Earthquake in Pakistan

It looks like it was centered 60 miles from Islamabad, and it was a 7.6 on the Richter scale.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan,
Oct. 8 - A powerful earthquake centered in the Hindu Kush mountains of Pakistan on Saturday morning sent tremors across South Asia, killing at least 1,600 people in remote northern Pakistan, hundreds across both sides of disputed Kashmir, and shaking houses and high-rises throughout the region.

No firm numbers of casualties were available. Details are not expected to emerge until the military reaches the far-flung villages in the North-West Frontier Province, where the quake was centered.

More than 1,600 were believed to have been killed in that province alone, the provincial police control room reported Saturday night. That toll includes an estimated 650 children who were killed in the collapse of three different schools.

Estimates of the quake's magnitude varied from 6.8 to 7.8, with the United States Geological Survey putting the number at 7.6. Its epicenter was roughly 60 miles north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, where 20 "significant aftershocks" measuring between 5 and 6.2 magnitude were felt throughout the day, Dr. Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, director general of the Meteorological Department in Islamabad, said by telephone on Saturday evening. Officials warned that serious aftershocks could continue for two days.

The earthquake, which sent tremors as far east as New Delhi, the Indian capital, and west to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, was the biggest to strike the country in a century, Dr. Chaudhry said.

The top police official of the North-West Frontier Province, Riffat Pasha, said Saturday evening that the death toll there continued to rise and that relief efforts had been stymied by blocked roads and broken communication channels.

"The situation is very, very bad," he said. "There are bodies lying everywhere. Those who have survived are lying in the open without food, shelter or medicine.

"The situation has been made worse by the rain and hailstorm that followed the earthquake," he continued. "There is no way we can reach out to them."

Private television stations showed images of leveled houses in the Pakistani side of Kashmir. Telephone lines remained down, and roads were blocked because of landslides. Torrential rain on Saturday evening was likely to impede relief efforts.

Does anyone have an idea of which charities are best suited to serve this area of the world? I checked Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders, who are usually among the first on the ground, and neither of them have anything on their web pages yet.