Published on : 30/08/2022 – 05:31
Floods caused by monsoon rains in Pakistan have killed at least 1,136 people, according to the latest report published Monday evening. A third of the territory is currently “under water”, according to the Minister of Climate Change. A gigantic rescue operation is underway, and international aid is slowly beginning to arrive.
Tens of millions of people in Pakistan Tuesday (30 August) continues to battle the worst monsoon rains in three decades, which have claimed at least 1,136 lives, washed away countless homes and destroyed vital farmland.
A third of Pakistan is currently “under water”, Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman said Monday in an interview with AFP, referring to a “crisis of unimaginable proportions”. “It’s all just one big ocean, there’s no dry place to pump water from,” she said, adding that the economic cost would be devastating.
>> To see: “In Pakistan, the monsoon causes deadly floods”
The monsoon rains, which started in June, are “unprecedented for 30 years”, underlined Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, while traveling through the affected regions in the North while, in the South, the country’s main river, the Indus threatens to get out of bed.
According to the latest report on Monday from the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), the monsoon has claimed at least 1,136 lives since it began in June, including 75 in the past 24 hours. But the authorities are still trying to reach isolated villages located in northern mountainous areas, which might further increase the toll. More than 33 million people, or one in seven Pakistanis, have been affected by the floods and nearly a million homes have been destroyed or severely damaged, the government said.
Call for donations
People displaced by the floods have found shelter in hastily established makeshift camps across Pakistan. A massive military-led relief operation is underway in the country, where international aid is slowly starting to arrive. The United Nations and the Pakistani government, which has declared a state of emergency, will officially launch an appeal on Tuesday for donations of 160 million dollars to finance emergency aid.
Pakistani officials attribute the devastating weather to climate change, saying their country is suffering the consequences of irresponsible environmental practices elsewhere in the world.
>> To see: “In the mountains of Pakistan, populations are threatened by climate change”
According to Minister Rehman, the weather is even worse than that of 2010, when 2,000 people were killed and almost a fifth of Pakistan was submerged by monsoon rains.
Pakistan received twice as much rainfall as usual, according to the meteorological service. In the southern provinces (Baluchistan and Sind), the most affected, the rains were more than four times higher than the average of the last thirty years.
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Flooded cropland
Near Sukkur in Sindh, where a massive colonial-era dam on the Indus River is vital to preventing the disaster from getting worse, a farmer lamented seeing his rice fields lost. “Our plantations extended over 2,000 hectares, on which the best quality rice was sown and eaten by you and us,” Khalil Ahmed, 70, told AFP. “It’s all over.”
The head of the dam assured that the bulk of the water flowing from the north of the country by the river should reach the work around September 5, but said he was confident in its ability to withstand the shock.
The dam diverts the waters of the Indus to thousands of kilometers of canals which constitute one of the largest irrigation networks in the world. But the farms thus served are now completely flooded.
The NDMA claimed that more than 80,000 hectares of farmland had been ravaged and more than 3,400 kilometers of roads and 157 bridges washed away.
With AFP
