Villagers live in fear a year after quake

Dubri Bandi, Pakistan: A year after surviving Pakistan's devastating earthquake, Dubri Bandi's villagers still live in fear.

The might of the 7.6-magnitude quake of October 8, 2005, is evident across the Himalayan terrain in Pakistan's part of Kashmir. Towering over this isolated settlement, Dina mountain was cleaved in two.

Most homes in Dubri Bandi collapsed in the tremor. But it was spared from the worst of the disaster: an enormous rockslide that swept rice paddies and houses away in nearby villages, entombing as many as 1,800 people.

Only 12 people died in Dubri Bandi, crushed by fallen timber and roofs. A year later, its villagers live in makeshift shelters perched on a sheer slope of stone-terraced maize fields above an enormous expanse of car-sized boulders and pine trees that snapped like twigs.

The Pashtun tribespeople who came here 300 years ago from Afghanistan have started building cement foundations for new homes. But they fear the land above or beneath them could shift at any moment and cast them all into the valley.

Landslide danger

"At night when the wind blows, the children are frightened and hide in their beds," said 40-year-old tribesman Zulfiqar Khan. "There are 43 houses here and they are all in danger from another landslide. But we have no choice. We have no other place to go." Nearby, fallen rock that blocked two mountain streams has created a huge lake, estimated to be 85 metres deep, that is threatening the town of Hattian Bala a few kilometres away. The Pakistani army has constructed two massive spillways to alleviate the threat of flooding, but villagers say the water level is still rising by five centimetres a day.

The earthquake killed more than 80,000 people in Pakistan and left over 3 million homeless. A vast swath of the country's north - and India's portion of Kashmir - was devastated. In many places, whole mountainsides were hewn off.

When Dina split, its rubble buried the 70 homes in the nearby village of Lodiabad and only four of its 250 people survived. Three other villages were heavily damaged, killing hundreds.

"I ran out of my house and looked back and saw rocks falling from the mountain, flying through the air like balls of cotton," said Mohammad Sangir Khan, 40, a Lodiabad survivor living in a tent camp.