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At about 3 a.m. on 31 May 1935, an earthquake lasting roughly thirty seconds flattened Quetta, a British Indian garrison town in Baluchistan, and killed around 30,000 people, most of them asleep in the civil town. The military cantonment was comparatively spared, so thousands of soldiers were available within hours to dig survivors out of the rubble, run field hospitals, and impose order on the ruins.
The same shock produces very different death tolls depending on what people are sleeping under. Heavy mud-brick and unreinforced masonry roofs collapse all at once and crush their occupants, while lighter or better-built structures stay up.
Most people trapped under rubble live only if they are reached within the first hours or days. The deciding factor is therefore how much disciplined, equipped labor is already on site when the disaster hits, not how much aid arrives later. A garrison that happens to survive inside the disaster zone is worth more than a far larger relief effort that has to travel there.
Relief reaches a point where searching for more survivors costs more lives than it saves, because decomposing bodies bring the threat of epidemic disease. Authorities then have to stop digging, evacuate the living, and cordon off the dead city. This is a deliberate triage decision that moves the effort from rescuing individuals to protecting the whole population, and it lands hardest on families whose relatives are still under the rubble.