An earthquake of magnitude 7.6 struck the hills north-east of Islamabad at 8.50 in the morning on October 8, 2005, and killed more than 73,000 people in the part of Kashmir administered by Pakistan. Muzaffarabad, the largest town near the centre of it, lost most of its buildings. It was a Saturday. School was in session, which is why so many of the dead were children: several schools came down on their pupils, and the district of Mansehra alone lost hundreds. Around 3.5 million people were left without a roof.
The cause was the same collision that built the Himalayas. The Indian plate pushes into Eurasia and keeps loading the faults beneath it. The rupture ran about 75 kilometres along a fault that had not been mapped as active, at a depth of perhaps 10 kilometres, which put the shaking close to the surface and directly underneath towns whose buildings were stone and concrete block with heavy roofs and no reinforcement at all. The slopes there are steep and terraced, and the shaking started thousands of landslides that buried villages and closed the roads into them, so nothing could get through overland for days.
Help came slowly. The Pakistani army had lost men at its general headquarters in Rawalpindi and moved what it had into the valleys; for the first week, helicopters were the only way in. At those altitudes winter arrives early, and the relief operation was working against a deadline rather than an open-ended one. India and Pakistan, which have disputed the region since 1947, opened crossing points along the Line of Control in November so that supplies and displaced people could move, and for once the line was used to let help through rather than keep people out.
The government set up the Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority within weeks, and rebuilding ran for years with mixed results: some towns were rebuilt to building codes that had never been enforced before, and many were not. The figure usually quoted outside Pakistan, around 87,000 dead, counts deaths across the whole region, including on the Indian side of the line and a handful in Afghanistan. The fault is still there. The same hills are still waiting.