ON THE GROUND: South Asia quake - day seven

Girl looks out from makeshift tent at a relief camp in Poonch, 250 Km (156 miles) northwest of Jammu, in Indian-administered Kashmir. REUTERS/Amit Gupta

LONDON (AlertNet)

- Almost a week after the earthquake, roads are re-opening but the weather is getting worse. On Friday, AlertNet asked aid workers and other experts for their latest assessments of the situation on the ground.

Here is a rolling snapshot of their responses, based on telephone interviews. Scroll down to see new comments.

It's hard to land a helicopter on a mountainside

Medical aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said helicopters were in demand because of patchy road access in the mountainous earthquake zone, but operating a helicopter was tricky because of the high altitude and scarcity of empty flat ground to land on.

"One problem of working in Pakistan is that the mountainous conditions make it much more difficult. The thinner the air the less a helicopter can carry. What it can carry at sea level it can't carry at 2,500 metres," MSF logistician Matt Everitt said from Islamabad .

Landing the helicopter was difficult because of the amount of debris and electrical cables on the ground.

"Electricity wires have come down and you do not know whether they are live or not," he said.

"Also, people obviously go to flat ground (after a quake) and you do not want to squash them. Finding appropriate landing zones is a problem."

MSF, which is currently using a U.N. helicopter, has hired a Camel 32 which is due to arrive on Monday. It is designed to work at altitude and carry three tonnes of relief.

Getting helicopters is no easy job, Oxfam says

With much of the quake zone inaccessible by road, helictopters are vital for getting aid and doctors to surivivors.

But Oxfam, which hopes to have a helicopter by early next week, said there were a host of problems in procuring helicopters after a disaster.

"In some emergencies governments come forward and offer helicopters to aid agencies like Oxfam, but when they don't you have to go and source a helicopter which is not the easiest thing in the world," Oxfam's spokeswoman Shaista Aziz said.

"The Pakistani government has taken up to three days to get helicopters ?? and they actually put out an alert asking for the international community to respond. If we put that into context then it's obvious an aid agency is going to come way down the pecking order. If it's taken them three days then it will take an aid agency longer.

"The other thing is that we have to make sure we work with companies that have been ethically checked We cannot just get a helicopter from anywhere?? we need to make sure the company or whoever we are sourcing a helicopter from doesn't have links to the military, for example. We have to be neutral."

After that you have to get permission to fly in Pakistan's airspace and sort out a host of logistical problems like fuel and landing places.

"We understand that for people desperately in need that this is six days too long if they have been waiting for tents and blankets. But we believe that we have activated our emergency response as fast as possible."

Aid traffic makes bad roads worse

Many roads in Kashmir are blocked, and rain and aftershocks are probably making routes even less accessible, as well as highly dangerous, an aid agency logistics officer in Pakistan said.

"First there is the risk, and there is the fact that trucks moving on a bad surface is going to make it worse.

"You have to make a choice. Are you going to take food through?"

Helicopters, the main alternative to road traffic, are limited in what they could carry, the logistics officer said. "It's like a drop of water in the sea." He said they were more suited for use in the first days after an earthquake to assess damage, rather than making large-scale aid deliveries.

However, he said more helicopters had arrived. "Now Aga Khan (Foundation) has four helicopters, (International Committee of the Red Cross) ICRC has two, U.N. have two now?? Of course, it's not enough, but for me it's good."

Aid workers are often reluctant to work alongside the military, because it could compromise their position and put them at risk, but the logistics officer said there was no evidence of any lack of co-operation in the quake relief operation.

"If you want to get your cargo into Pakistan, your cargo is going to be dropped in a military airport," he said. "So you have no choice." He said military helicopters - many of them sent from neighbouring Afghanistan - were running their own operations with goods from countries such as Saudi Arabia.

"I think the problem is not between humanitarians and the military - it's more between NGOs and the U.N. on one side and the government on the other."

He said the Pakistani government had initially failed to send representatives to relief coordination meetings called by the United Nations.

"It was only on the fourth one that the government began to attend. The first one is understandable, even the second day, but by the third day you have to ask some questions?? They were invited," he said.

Spontaneous generosity blocks roads and aid

Well-meaning members of the public are driving supplies into the quake zone, blocking roads and delaying official relief from getting through to the people who need it, according to Amanda Pitt, spokeswoman for the U.N. team coordinating information on the relief response.

"The real problem with the roads now is not landslides but congestion," she said.

"Pakistani communities have got cars and trucks and filled them with relief goods and are just driving them up there, as are the army and the relief agencies. In the centre of Muzaffarabad, the roads were practically gridlocked yesterday."

She said the government was doing what it could to channel private relief donations.

"When people want to help, that's what they do, and you really can't stop them doing that. The message they're getting is people need your food, water, food, clothing and tents now, so of course their reaction is get in a car and go and give it to them.

"There is a huge Pakistani diaspora and a large percentage of those people's families are from this area. They're mobilising huge amounts of aid. It's something everybody's very grateful for."

She said the Pakistani government was in charge of clearing and repairing roads - which were re-opening all the time -- and the army was establishing field hospitals, digging latrines, and setting up tents. She said: "It's their job to do, it's their country. We are only here to support them."

Top tent-producing nation running short of tents Concern

's head of operations in Pakistan, Dorothy Blane, said tents were hard to come by even though Pakistan was ironically one of the world's major tent manufactures.

"It's a race against time in terms of the weather ?? There was a first light snow fall today and it's only going to get worse," she said speaking from Islamabad.

"Pakistan is one of the world's main suppliers of tents to the world, but it's very hard to get them here. They don't have 100,000 sitting waiting here. They can make the tents fairly quickly, but they don't have giant stocks."

"Food supply is not an issue, but food distribution is an issue - there's still 20 percent of the affected area that we do not have access to."

"We are still hearing stories of people coming out alive today but I don't think there will be many more."

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.