'I am homeless at old age'

More than 9,000 houses and 113 schools damaged by quake in the northwest.

Shangla: Residents in a northwestern Pakistani town that was among the worst-affected by this week's massive earthquake were seeking government help on Wednesday to rebuild their damaged homes, after spending the second straight night with relatives.
Authorities said Monday's quake damaged more than 9,000 homes and 113 schools in Pakistan's impoverished northwest.
Rescuers in Afghanistan and Pakistan are struggling to reach regions stricken by the magnitude-8.1 quake, which was centered in Afghanistan's sparsely populated Badakhshan province that borders Pakistan, Tajikistan and China. The quake left at least 258 people dead in Pakistan, 115 in Afghanistan and three on the Indian side of the disputed region of Kashmir.
Casualty figures are likely to leap once relief workers return from remote villages that can be accessed only by foot or donkey.
The earthquake damaged many of the few existing roads, officials said. Dropping aid by air will be the only way to reach many of the needy, but those operations are not likely to start for many days, until survey teams on foot return and report on the damage.
The Pakistani town closest to the epicentre is Chitral, and one of the worst-affected towns is Shangla, where 70-year-old Zurqun Nain said his extended family was living at a relatives' home after the quake damaged his house. "I had my own home before the earthquake. Now I am homeless at this old age," he said.
Another resident, Said Alam, said his family was still waiting for government help.
Monday's quake shook buildings in the capital, Islamabad, and cities elsewhere in Pakistan for up to 45 seconds in the early afternoon, creating cracks in walls and causing blackouts.
The picturesque Swat Valley and areas around Dir, Malakand and Shangla towns in the mountains of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province were hard-hit by the earthquake. Officials said 202 of the dead were killed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
More than 2,000 people were injured in Monday's temblor, which also damaged more than 4,000 homes in Pakistan, officials said.
Pakistan's military said in a statement that engineers succeeded in reopening portions of the Karakoram Highway blocked by landslides caused by the quake. It allowed authorities to begin transporting relief supplies to affected areas in the northern regions, where dozens were killed and hundreds of others left homeless.
Helicopters and military planes were transporting relief supplies and military engineers were working on restoring communication lines disrupted by landslides, said Lt-Gen. Asim Saleem Bajwa, the army spokesman. A magnitude-7.6 quake hit Pakistan on Oct. 8, 2005, killing more than 80,000 people and leaving more than 3 million homeless, most of them in the northwest of the country and in the divided region of Kashmir. That quake was much shallower - 10km below the surface of the earth, compared to the depth of 213km on Monday - and thus caused greater damage, said Mohammed Hanif, an official at the Meteorological Department.
In the Swat Valley town of Mingora, resident Jamal Ali Shah said the earthquake "was like the day of judgment." He sobbed as he sat outside his damaged home with his belongings around him, fearing the building would collapse in an aftershock. In Peshawar, Asghar Ali said his 55-year-old father was walking in the street on Monday when bricks from a building hit him in the head. "People tried to take my father to the hospital but there was a chaos everywhere and traffic was blocked," he said. "My father died before he could be taken to the hospital."
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited the earthquake-hit town of Shangla in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where at least 49 people were killed and 80 injured.

• Pakistan