Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 2, 1993 TAG: 9310020142
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: PETHSANGHVI, INDIA LENGTH: Medium
Sixteen villages, including this farming community of 1,500 people, are now vast mounds of rock, dirt and timber, with almost every house destroyed and the majority of their inhabitants dead.
Acrid smoke hung above the ruins as Hindu families began cremating the bodies of family members on pyres built of tree branches and timbers from collapsed houses.
Soldiers masked against the stench of death found three babies alive Friday in the rubble of Holi, one of the villages.
The rescues were small spots of joy in a dismal landscape, where pyres piled high with bodies flickered around dozens of villages, and stunned residents, drenched by incessant rains, wandered through the wreckage.
Some villages were virtual ghost towns, too remote to be reached by rescue teams and with too few survivors to begin picking through the tons of dirt and rock.
"All my children, my grandchildren -everybody is gone," wailed 60-year-old Dhouda Bai as she watched teen-age relief volunteers drag the body of one of her sons from beneath the debris of what was once Pethsanghvi. Local officials say as much as 90 percent of Pethsanghvi's population may be dead. The smell of decomposing bodies was so strong that workers tied handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths.
As India mobilized 5,000 army troops and hundreds of volunteer workers to begin ministering to the needs of tens of thousands left homeless by the country's deadliest earthquake in 59 years, the government revised its death toll, raising its estimate to 21,000 from 10,000.
Authorities said they increased the estimates after officials reached the more remote villages and were stunned by the devastation. However, the government did not maintain accurate populations counts in some of the villages and some officials said accurate death tolls will be difficult.
Most of the 49 towns and villages damaged or destroyed by the quake, which measured 6.4 on the Richter scale, are clustered in a 50-mile radius in the south-central part of Maharashtra state. The largest of the 16 demolished towns appears to be Khilari, which had 15,000 residents before the quake flattened the entire town, leaving an estimated 3,000 dead.
Only a few sturdy concrete shops remain standing there. Hundreds of stone houses have collapsed into heaps of debris so deep that the army began using bulldozers Friday to try to uncover bodies. Khilari officials said they do not believe there is a family in town that has not suffered deaths as a result of the quake.
Most of the quake victims died when the poorly constructed stone houses common to this region collapsed on them as they slept. As relief workers dug through the rubble, they unearthed many bodies that looked as though they were still sleeping, curled on their sides, covered with bright quilts.
The earthquake struck in an erratic pattern, almost like a tornado - destroying some villages and leaving other unscathed.
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB