Thousands of survivors need winterised tents

More than two months after the devastating earthquake that hit NWFP and Azad Kashmir, thousands of survivors still live in non-winterised shelters, as night-time temperatures drop below zero, even in low-lying areas.
Many others in the `spontaneous' camps don't have blankets at all, IRIN, the United Nation information unit reported on Thursday.
An estimated 2.5 million people are living in tents below 1,500 metres, while there are still 350,000 to 400,000 people remaining at risk in higher areas.
"Our tent is not suitable for the weather. It is really cold at night and we wrap ourselves in three blankets to keep warm," said Hussain, 45, from Charwaya village of Muzaffarabad.
"We have just been to see the doctor, my daughter has caught a cold because our tent cannot protect us from cold at nights," Tariq Rasheed, a father of five living at an emergency camp in Muzaffarabad, said.
"We need good tents for winter: the ones we are living in now are not good. We also need blankets," Muhammad Mattab Nizami, head of the local Hazrat Bilal Welfare Association (HBWA), which runs the camp, said, adding that in some tents there were up to three families, or a dozen people cramped into a small space.
There are around 200 tents in the camp, hosting roughly the same number of families, who mainly came from affected outlying villages in the area. "We are seven people in a tent and have only a couple of blankets," another camp resident maintained.
The concerns of the camp residents coincided with the results of a new survey jointly conducted by the UN agencies, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the Pakistani government and NGOs, presented by UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Pakistan, Jan Vandemoortele, in Islamabad, on Tuesday.
"As the coverage of households above 5,000 ft [1,500 m] snowline is nearing completion across the earthquake-affected areas, the focus is shifting towards people accommodated in tents outside planned shelter below the snowline,' Vandemoortele said.
Of some 3,000 households living outside planned camps below the snowline that were covered by the survey, almost 75 percent are living in inadequate shelters.
An average of 7.5 people are living in each tent, with each family possessing on average only two blankets and two quilts, according to the survey, which painted a difficult winter scenario for the survivors.