More than 1,100 people have died and hundreds of thousands of homes have been destroyed or severely damaged, following three months of unusually heavy monsoon rains in Pakistan. The catastrophe comes at the worst time for the country that is already mired in a serious economic crisis. The government declared a state of emergency and requests international help to combat the incident.
“The worst in the country’s history.” These words, spoken on Tuesday, August 30, by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, refer to the devastating floods that have directly affected more than 33 million people and killed at least 1,136 people in Pakistan.
One million houses and 80,000 hectares of agricultural land were destroyed while more than 800,000 head of cattle perished. And these figures are still provisional.
For the authorities, the usual vocabulary seems inappropriate in the face of the violence of the rains that have hit the country for three months. Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, Pakistan’s foreign minister, declared on August 28 that the current floods are so violent and deadly that they cannot be described as mere “monsoon rains”: “I have never seen destruction of this magnitude”, said.
None of the four provinces of the South Asian country have escaped the tragedy, although the capital, Islamabad, is currently safe from the storms.
In the south and west of the country, the displaced crowd the high roads or railway lines, fleeing the flooded plains. While waiting for help, the victims roam the few dry areas in search of shelter, food and clean water.
Authorities and humanitarian organizations said they are having difficulty getting aid to the millions of people who need it, as floodwaters have swept away roads, bridges and crossing points, leaving several areas completely cut off.
As efforts continue to help those affected, Planning and Development Minister Ahsan Iqbal said Tuesday that more than $10 billion will be needed to repair damage and rebuild damaged infrastructure.
Flooding worse than 2010
Pakistan’s Climate Change Minister, Sherry Rehman, declared on Monday that “to see the devastation on the ground is truly staggering” and blamed it on climate change, saying the country is suffering the consequences of irresponsibility in other parts of the world in regarding environmental practices.
Rehman explained that “literally a third of Pakistan is under water right now”, more than in the 2010 floods, when some 2,000 people lost their lives. “Everything is a big ocean, there is no dry place to pump water. It has become a crisis of unimaginable proportions,” he added.
The country of 220 million inhabitants is vulnerable to climate change and is the fifth most threatened by extreme weather events, according to a classification made in 2020 by the Germanwatch think tank. And it is that the geographical situation of Pakistan makes it a country threatened in the north by the melting of glaciers and in the south by the rise in sea level.
The country’s meteorological service has confirmed that the Pakistani territory received twice as much rainfall as usual. In Balochistan and Sindh, the southern provinces and the most affected, rainfall was four times higher than the average of the last 30 years.
Makeshift camps to house the displaced sprang up wherever possible: in schools, highways, or military bases.
“Life here is miserable,” Fazal e Malik, who is staying with 2,500 other people at a school complex in Nowshera, in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, told AFP. “I suck, but there’s no place to shower. No fans,” he added.
State of emergency and call for international solidarity
The Pakistani government has declared a state of emergency and has called for support from the international community.
This Tuesday he made an urgent request together with the United Nations to obtain 160 million dollars that will be used to finance an emergency plan for the next six months and initially to provide basic services such as health, food and drinking water to the 5.2 million of people most affected.
“Pakistan is awash in suffering. The people of Pakistan are facing a monsoon on steroids: the relentless impact of (huge) levels of rain and flooding is unprecedented,” lamented UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as his spokesman announced that the official will visit the country next week in “solidarity” with the victims.
The Pakistani people are facing a monsoon on steroids. More than 1000 people have been killed – with millions more lives shattered.
This colossal crisis requires urgent, collective action to help the Government & people of Pakistan in their hour of need. pic.twitter.com/aVFFy4Irwa
— Antonio Guterres (@antonioguterres) August 30, 2022
The floods have come at the worst possible time for Pakistan, which has been in a serious economic crisis for months. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) agreed on Monday to a financial support program and announced $1.1 billion in aid.
On the other hand, international assistance is beginning to arrive little by little: the United States communicated on Tuesday a first shipment of humanitarian support worth 30 million dollars while cargo flights have begun to arrive from China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates .
The great dam on the Indus river
The monsoon, which usually lasts from June to September, is essential for irrigating crops and replenishing the water resources of the Indian subcontinent. But in recent years, this natural phenomenon has increasingly become an ecological disaster, with all the destruction that comes with it.
Near Sukkur, the third largest city in Pakistan’s Sindh province, an imposing dam sits on the Indus River.
The dam dates from colonial times and is essential to prevent the disaster from worsening. The person in charge of it assured that most of the water that flows from the north of the country, through the river, was expected to reach the dam around September 5, but expressed confidence that the construction would withstand it.
The structure serves to divert water from the Indus into thousands of kilometers of canals, which form one of the largest irrigation networks in the world. But the farms to which these canals carry water are now completely flooded, in this country where agriculture is one of the pillars of the economy.
“Our plantations covered 2,000 hectares, in which the best quality rice was grown, which we and you ate,” Khalil Ahmed, 70, told AFP. “That’s all over.”
With AFP, Reuters
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