Sifting Through the Rubble

It's becoming clear that this last weekend's quake has not only decimated the physical geography of the affected areas of Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan, but also the populations on a scale commensurate with last winter's tsunami; here are some details from The Times of India:

A whole generation has been wiped out in the areas of Pakistan most devastated by the weekend's huge quake, Pakistan's military spokesman said Monday, adding that schoolchildren were the worst affected. "It is a whole generation that has been lost in the worst affected areas. The maximum number affected was schoolchildren," Major General Shaukat Sultan said. [...] The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and a senior government official speaking on condition of anonymity said Monday that between 30,000 and 40,000 people had died. Sultan said the toll was 20,000 but likely to increase. Foreign rescue teams were setting up field hospitals to cope with the tide of tens of thousands of people who were injured by the quake, Sultan added. [...] Witnesses and correspondents say schools collapsed in almost every town and village across devastated northwestern Pakistan and PoK. Many hundreds were trapped in the wreckage because the quake struck at the beginning of the school day and parents have been desperately digging at the rubble in the increasingly vain hope of getting them out.