Earthquake 8/10: learning from Pakistan’s experience

On 8 October 2005 Pakistan was struck by the most devastating earthquake in its history.
Affecting an area ofsome 30,000 sq. km, largely in Azad Kashmir and the North-West Frontier
Province, it caused over 73,000 deaths, left many more people seriously injured, and destroyed
homes,schools, hospitals and infrastructure on a massive scale.
Thisreport describes Pakistan’s experience of handling such a huge disaster. Written from the
perspective of the Federal Relief Commission, it focuses on the period up to March 2006 (when
theFRCwas mergedwith theEarthquake Reconstruction and RehabilitationAuthority,ERRA)
and details the response to the earthquake including rescue and relief operations, management
of displaced people, restoration of infrastructure, and so on. The report deliberately does not
provide extensive figures and statistics. Its focus israther on the overall approach and strategy
taken by the authorities and the many other organizations and agencies involved in the quake
response, and on the effectiveness of that approach.
As well as documenting experiences and providing a historicalrecord,the aim ofthe reportisto
highlight the key lessons learned. Disaster management is an extremely difficult undertaking:
each disaster poses its own problems and challenges, and there can be no set blue-print or plan
to dealwith every disaster – the approach and strategy to dealingwith each is only really decided
as it happens. But there are best practices, effective strategies, good techniques and things to
avoidwhich emerge from the experience of disaster management, andwhich provide a very useful
- indeed crucial - base of knowledge from which to tackle each new disaster. This report
highlightsthe main lessons, best practices and strategies, aswell as mistakes orweaknesses,which
emerged from Pakistan’s experience of handling the 2005 earthquake.
This report will clearly have tremendous utility for Pakistan, and for the National Disaster
Management Authority (NDMA) which was established in March 2007 in the aftermath of the
2005 earthquake. But it will also be useful for other countries. Sadly, massive natural disasters
– earthquakes,floods, hurricanes, cyclones,forestfires – are becoming increasingly common and
disaster managementis a challenge for developed and developing countries alike. Itis hoped that
the experiences and lessons documented in this report will help all of us to deal with such
calamities more effectively.