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Dateline ACTSouth Asia/Pakistan 0505Lack of sanitation facilities after earthquake cause for concernBy Arne Grieg Riisnæs, ACT InternationalBalakot Province, Pakistan, October 24, 2005--The potential danger due to a lack of sanitation facilities in the earthquake-stricken areas of Pakistan has been likened to a ticking time bomb, thousands upon thousands of people have no access to latrines. The complete lack of hygiene and the amount of untreated excreta can set such a bomb off, Bill Fellows of UNICEF told ACT International last week.When the earthquake hit, Fellows, a senior regional water and sanitation officer for UNICEF in South Asia, happened to be in Pakistan on a mission to assist the government to organize a sanitation conference. Now, he is coordinating the overall response in water and sanitation, and on Tuesday last week, he described the potential for a massive disaster. "We are dealing with an area that is actually larger than the tsunami. We are dealing with one of the most difficult terrains in the world. And we are dealing with an affected population that is even larger than the one affected by the tsunami. So in three dimensions we are dealing with a problem that is even worse than the tsunami was." Fellows underlined that the earthquake had knocked out all the water supplies and that quite naturally, there has been a focus on getting water to people, as this is an immediate and important need. "But even more important is the lack of latrines. We think we have five or six hundred thousand shelters that have been wiped out--and then the toilets and latrines have also been wiped out. Then we have a huge, huge problem," he said, explaining that "it is a ticking time bomb with several million people just openly defecating in their immediate environment. "Fellows added that "the amounts of excreta and the lack of hygiene is of a scale that I have never had to deal with in 30 years of working in this sector." Because of the immediate response from within Pakistan in general, people had been kept alive. International aid has helped bolster this initial response. However, Fellows stressed that there is a need to move fast and to get to the more remote areas affected by the earthquake."What makes it even more difficult, in terms of time, is that winter is setting in. And as soon as winter sets in we are going to lose our access to hundreds of thousands of people. If we don't reach them before that, and we go back in the spring, we may find no one left." Arne Grieg Riisnæs is a communicator with Norwegian Church Aid (NCA) which is a member of ACT International. ACT Home Latest news Other Datelines Photos from Emergencies
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