Helicopters delivering food and rescuing injured earthquake survivors soon could be grounded because the airlift is running out of money, frustrated UN officials warned Friday.
The United Nations has enough cash to keep choppers flying into northern Pakistan’s quake zone for only another week, senior relief officials said in a frantic appeal for donors to deliver cash and food.
“It is now or never,” Jan Vandemoortele, the UN’s earthquake relief coordinator, said.
“Tomorrow will be too late for thousands and thousands of victims,” he added, “especially babies and small children vulnerable to pneumonia, diarrhea and malnutrition.”
Survivors in remote villages will die if the United Nations doesn’t get $50 million immediately to keep relief helicopters flying into areas that will be cut off by snow in coming weeks, said Matthew Hollingworth, the World Food Program’s logistics chief here.
The relief operation is short about $120 million for the next five months, Hollingworth said.
The United States and 59 other countries pledged $580 million for earthquake relief at a Geneva conference last week, but only $15.8 million of that was promised for immediate delivery.
And countries often pledge aid that is never delivered, officials said.
The United States leads the donor list. It has paid or made legally binding commitments of more than $80 million in earthquake relief, according to UN figures. That amounts to 31 percent of total contributions and commitments, which exclude non-binding pledges.
Japan and Qatar are next on the donor list, with contributions and commitments of about $20 million each. Private donors make up the fourth-largest category, with more than $16 million in donations.
The magnitude 7.6 quake on Oct. 8 killed nearly 80,000. It injured 78,000 others and left 3.3 million people homeless.
Relief workers acknowledge that at first they didn’t realize the extent of the catastrophe, or how difficult it would be to deliver aid to hundreds of destroyed villages across a wide, mountainous region.
They called the massive relief effort more daunting than the operation following December’s Asian tsunami, to which the world responded much more quickly.
South Asia’s earthquake survivors haven’t received as much international support as people affected by the tsunami for several reasons, including the fact that the quake followed several major disasters this year, Vandemoortele said.
