SUKKUR,
Pakistan —
Pakistan’s flooded southern Sindh
province braced Sunday for a fresh deluge from swollen rivers in the north as
the death toll from this year’s monsoon topped 1,000.
اضافة اعلان
The mighty Indus River that courses through
Pakistan’s second-most populous region is fed by dozens of mountain tributaries
to the north, but many have burst their banks following record rains and
glacier melt.
Officials warned torrents of water are expected to
reach Sindh in the next few days, adding misery to millions already affected by
the floods.
“Right now, Indus is in high flood,” said Aziz
Soomro, the supervisor of Sukkur Barrage — a massive colonial-era construction
that regulates the river’s flow and redirects water to a vast system of canals.
The annual monsoon is essential for irrigating crops
and replenishing lakes and dams across the Indian subcontinent, but it also
brings 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 Sunday, the country’s
National Disaster Management Authority said the death toll from the monsoon rains had reached
1,033, with 119 killed in the previous 24 hours.
It said this year’s floods were comparable to 2010 —
the worst on record — when over 2,000 people died and nearly a fifth of the
country was under water.
Prime Minister
Shehbaz Sharif, who cancelled a trip
to Britain to oversee relief operations, said he had never seen anything like
it before.
“Village after village has been wiped out. Millions
of houses have been destroyed. There has been immense destruction,” he said
after flying over Sindh by helicopter.
Thousands of people living near flood-swollen rivers in Pakistan’s north
were ordered to evacuate from danger zones, but army helicopters and rescuers
are still plucking laggards to safety.
“People were informed around three or four o’clock
in the morning to evacuate their houses,” rescue worker Umar Rafiq told AFP.
“When the flood water hit the area we had to rescue
children and women.”
Many rivers in the area — a picturesque tourist
destination of rugged mountains and valleys — have burst their banks,
demolishing scores of buildings including a 150-room hotel that crumbled into a
raging torrent.
Guest house owner Nasir Khan, whose business was
badly hit by the 2010 flooding, said he had lost everything.
“It has washed away the remaining part of the
hotel,” he told AFP.
The flood-swollen rivers were also yielding unlikely
riches.
Locals scrambled to snag thousands of valuable
cedar, pine, and oak logs that had likely been illegally harvested in the mountains
but were being washed downstream.
Climate change to blame
Officials blame the
devastation on human-driven climate change, saying Pakistan is unfairly bearing
the consequences of irresponsible environmental practices elsewhere in the
world.
Pakistan is eighth on NGO German watch’s Global
Climate Risk Index, a list of countries deemed most vulnerable to extreme
weather caused by climate change.
Exacerbating the situation, corruption, poor
planning, and the flouting of local regulations mean thousands of buildings
have been erected in areas prone to seasonal flooding.
The government has declared an emergency and
mobilized the military to deal with what Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman
has called “a catastrophe of epic scale”.
In parts of Sindh, the only dry areas are the
elevated roads and railroad tracks, alongside which tens of thousands of poor
rural folk have taken shelter with their livestock.
Near Sukkur, a row of tents stretched for 2km, with
people still arriving by boats loaded with wooden charpoy beds and pots and
pans — the only possessions they could salvage.
“Water started rising in the river from yesterday,
inundating all the villages and forcing us to flee,” laborer Wakeel Ahmed, 22,
told AFP.
Sukkur Barrage supervisor Soomro told AFP every
sluice gate was open to deal with a river flow of more than 600,000 cubic
meters per second.
The flooding could not come at a worse time for
Pakistan, where the economy is in free fall and the former prime minister Imran
Khan was ousted by a parliamentary vote of no confidence in April.
While the capital Islamabad and adjoining twin
garrison city of Rawalpindi have escaped the worst of the flooding, its effects
were still being felt.
“Currently supplies are very limited,” said Muhammad
Ismail, a produce shopkeeper in Rawalpindi.
“Tomatoes, peas, onions, and other vegetables are
not available due to the floods,” he told AFP, adding prices were also soaring.
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