The UN on Tuesday said the earthquake in eastern Afghanistan that has killed more than 900 people could impact “hundreds of thousands”, and warned of an “exponential” rise in casualties.
“We think potentially the impacted individuals would go up to almost into the hundreds of thousands,” Indrika Ratwatte, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan, told reporters in Geneva, speaking from Kabul.
Already, more than 900 people are known to have been killed and thousands injured in the 6.0-magnitude earthquake, which hit remote areas in mountainous provinces near the border with Pakistan around midnight Sunday, followed by at least five aftershocks.
“The numbers are definitely going to increase,” Ratwatte said, adding there was “no question that the casualty rate is going to be rather exponential”.
The earthquake’s epicentre was about 27 kilometres (17 miles) from the city of Jalalabad, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS), which said it struck around eight kilometres below the Earth’s surface.
Such relatively shallow quakes can cause more damage, especially since the majority of Afghans live in low-rise, mud-brick homes vulnerable to collapse.
Ratwatte said homes in the affected region were largely “mud and wooden roof structures, so when the walls collapse, the roof is what basically for the individuals kills them or suffocates them”.
“It’s a low (population) density, but since this happened in the night, everybody was sleeping so I think (the casualty figure) is going to be much higher.”
He added that the quake had set off “lots of landslides, rockfalls, etc., and access has been very limited. This has posed a huge challenge”.
“The biggest challenge is to reach these remote areas with the road access extremely damaged,” he said, stressing the need for helicopters to reach those in need, evacuate the injured and deploy search and rescue and medical teams.
After decades of conflict, Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, facing a protracted humanitarian crisis and the influx of millions of Afghans forced back to the country by neighbours Pakistan and Iran in recent years.
Ratwatte urged countries to show solidarity with the people of Afghanistan “facing multiple crises, multiple shocks”.
He lamented that an appeal for $2.8 billion to provide desperately needed aid to Afghans this year was so far only 28-percent funded.
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