On 8 October 2005 a 7.6 earthquake hit northern Pakistan, sending shockwaves across an area of 30,000 km2. It killed more than 80,000 people, injured another 70,000 and made 2.5 million homeless.
Within hours of the earthquake, the Operations Team of DFID's Conflict, Humanitarian and Security Department (CHASE OT, managed by Crown Agents) had established an operations room. This brought together coordinators, information officers, humanitarian advisors and logistics officers as well as support staff in London and in Pakistan to manage, over the following months, £58 million pledged by the British government towards emergency assistance.
The first action was to deploy search and rescue teams. They travelled with OT specialists who became the first field team. This team, which at its peak would be five strong, stayed in place for six months, until the end of March 2006.
Relief items including tents, tarpaulins and blankets from DFID's stockpiles in the UAE and UK quickly followed, and were distributed to NGOs such as Christian Aid, Islamic Relief, Merlin, Oxfam, Save the Children and Tearfund.
One of the most pressing features of the emergency was the overwhelming demand for shelter materials, particularly for the quarter-million people living in camps. The Himalayan terrain posed tremendous logistical difficulties for the relief workers, resulting in one of the largest-scale humanitarian air-lift operations ever mounted. As well as programming £40 million in the form of funding grants to NGOs, the Red Cross Movement and United Nations agencies, the Team managed over 80 airlifts and the recruitment of surge capacity personnel such as water and sanitation engineers, coordinators and logistics experts for UNICEF, WFP, WHO and several other front line agencies.