2005 was a particularly tumultuous year for the earth in terms of natural disasters. Channel 4 commissioned a two hour special and I was asked to document the aftermath of the Pakistan earthquake.  

I was frankly nervous about visiting northern Pakistan at the foot of the Himalayan region. I’d heard and read stories about bandits in Kashmir and the Hindu Kush, trouble on the border with Afghanistan and India, altogether an unsafe and dangerous place to be.  

The prospect of visiting a region which was on its knees and in a state of desperation raised concerns for my own safety. In a stroke of good fortune I interviewed Maqsood Sheikh in London days before my planned departure who had witnessed the actual earthquake as it struck and destroyed his home town of Bagh in eastern Pakistan.  

He turned out to be an influential patron of the region and he kindly offered to protect my sound recordist, Geoff Price, and I while we were there. And boy was he true to his word.  

We were collected by his men at the airport and they didn’t let us out of their sight the entire trip. They slept in the house our new friend lent us in Islamabad. They drove us in what must have been the best 4x4 in the country and followed in another car.  

That kind of protection which involves situations where you are really glad of local ex-army Special Forces protection was literally a lifesaver. I’ll never forget the hungry, desperate faces which loomed from nowhere every time we stopped, even 8,000 feet up in the mountains at 2.00 in the morning in driving rain.  

The region was in absolute chaos, hardly a single building was still standing and nothing was working. The desperation was heart-rending. Roads disappeared without warning where the land had fallen away or been hit by a boulder the size of a truck.  

Our companion and expert on the trip was Englishman Dr Roger Bilham, a geologist from Colorado University. His specialist subject is the Himalayan fault which is on a tectonic plate which runs all the way down to Karachi in the south.  

Roger was dropping off seismic instruments along the fault to measure shifts in the rock and seismic activity. He’d detected a series of major shifts in the six months prior to the quake but such is the science and worries of false alarm involved in making predictions about major events, it isn’t until there is a racing certainty of something happening can you press the panic button. And that is still only a certainty usually only minutes or seconds before an earthquake.  

Because the area the earthquake hit is so mountainous and remote it was hard to ascertain the exact numbers killed but it is believed to be around 75,000 including 17,000 schoolchildren.  

Sadly, because of the remoteness of the area and the clandestine activities of some parties in that region of the world, the effect of the earthquake vanished off the world’s radar astonishingly quickly.  

The sights we saw were some of the worst I’ve ever witnessed and the experience haunts me now. The towns of Muzaffarabad, Balakot and Bagh were flattened and thousands of bodies were still buried deep under the rubble.  

Where consignments of clothing and shoes had been dropped by the US Army and the Red Cross, most of the clothes were still scattered across acres of ground, unwanted, unusable, discarded. That struck me as odd, but I imagine people were looking for warm clothing and blankets and the rest would be too much to carry on your back.  

The US Army on a supply drop flew Roger and I in a Chinook helicopter down the fault line along their mercy route and we could see the scar the earthquake had made through the mountains for hundreds of miles. Millions of tons of top soil had slid away revealing fresh limestone beneath. Extraordinary and a world exclusive.  

Roger and I visited a school where the roofs fell in and killed hundreds of children, and we saw thousands of refugees camping under tarpaulins perched on the edge of the mountain. In the higher regions it was beginning to snow. Thousands of refugees died in the cold that winter.

To watch video click here.