Sukkur – AFP
Heavy rains hit much of Pakistan on Friday, following the government declared a state of emergency to deal with monsoon floods that affected some 33 million people.
The National Disaster Management Authority said Friday that more than 900 people have been killed this year, including 34 in the past 24 hours, as a result of the monsoon rains that began in June.
The country’s disaster agency said that regarding 220,000 homes were destroyed, while half a million others were severely damaged, and the provincial disaster agency said that two million acres of cultivated crops had been wiped out in Sindh province alone.
Nasrallah Mehar, a Pakistani farmer, said: “The cotton crop that I planted on an area of 50 acres has been completely destroyed. It is a great loss for me.”
Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman, who on Wednesday described the floods as a “disaster of enormous scale”, declared that the government had declared a state of emergency and demanded international help.
Officials said this year’s floods might be compared to the worst of 2010, when more than 2,000 people were killed and regarding a fifth of the country’s population was trapped.
“I have never in my life seen such massive floods due to rain,” farmer Rahim Bakhsh Brohi told AFP near Sukkur in the southern province of Sindh.
Like thousands in rural Pakistan, Brohi was looking for shelter near the national highway; The elevated roads are among the few dry places in the aquatic landscape.
Pakistan ranks eighth in the Global Climate Hazard Index, a list compiled by the environmental non-governmental organization German Watch of countries considered most vulnerable to extreme weather events caused by climate change.
