MINGORA, Pakistan — Thousands of people
living near flood-swollen rivers in
Pakistan’s north were ordered to evacuate
Saturday as the death toll from devastating monsoon rains neared 1,000 with no
end in sight.
اضافة اعلان
Many rivers in
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — a picturesque province of rugged mountains and valleys —
have burst their banks, demolishing scores of buildings including a 150-room
hotel that crumbled into a raging torrent.
“The house which we built with years of hard work
started sinking in front of our eyes,” said Junaid Khan, 23, the owner of two
fish farms in Chrasadda.
“We sat on the side of the road and watched our
dream house sinking.”
The annual monsoon is essential for irrigating crops
and replenishing lakes and dams across the Indian subcontinent, but each year
it also brings a wave of destruction.
Officials say this year’s monsoon flooding has
affected more than 33 million people — one in seven Pakistanis — destroying or
badly damaging nearly a million homes.
On Saturday, authorities ordered thousands of
residents in threatened areas to evacuate their homes as rivers had still not
reached maximum capacity.
“Initially some people refused to leave, but when
the water level increased they agreed,” Bilal Faizi, spokesman for the Rescue
1122 emergency service, told AFP.
Officials say this year’s floods are comparable to
2010 — the worst on record — when over 2,000 people died and nearly a fifth of
the country was under water.
Farmer Shah Faisal, camped by the side of a road in
Chrasadda with his wife and two daughters, described how he saw his riverside
home swallowed by a river as the powerful current eroded the bank.
The Jindi, Swat, and
Kabul rivers flow through the
town before joining the mighty Indus, which is also flooding downstream.
“We escaped with our lives,” Faisal told AFP.
Climate change
Officials blame the devastation on man-made
climate change, saying
Pakistan is unfairly bearing the consequences of irresponsible environmental
practices elsewhere in the world.
Pakistan is
eighth on the Global Climate Risk Index, a list compiled by the environmental
NGO Germanwatch of countries deemed most vulnerable to extreme weather caused
by climate change.
Still, local
authorities must shoulder some of the blame for the devastation.
Corruption, poor
planning, and the flouting of local regulations mean thousands of buildings
have been erected in areas prone to seasonal flooding — albeit not as bad as
this year.
The government
has declared an emergency and mobilized the military to deal with what Climate
Change Minister Sherry Rehman on Wednesday called “a catastrophe of epic
scale”.
According to the
National Disaster Management Authority, since the monsoon started in June more
than 8,100sq.km. of cultivated crops have been wiped out, 3,100km of roads have
been destroyed and 149 bridges have been washed away.
In Sukkur, more
than 1,000km south of Swat, farmlands irrigated by the Indus were under water,
and tens of thousands of people were seeking shelter on elevated roads and
highways as they waited for fresh torrents from the north.
“We have opened
the gates fully,” dam supervisor Aziz Soomro told AFP, adding the main rush of
water was expected Sunday.
The flooding
could not come at a worse time for Pakistan, whose economy is in free fall and
whose politics are gripped by crisis following the ousting of former prime
minister Imran Khan by a parliamentary vote of no confidence in April.
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