Islamabad, Aug 28: Deaths from widespread flooding in Pakistan have passed 1,000 since mid-June, officials have said, as a minister called the country’s deadly monsoon season “a serious climate catastrophe”.
Flash flooding from the heavy rains has washed away villages and crops as soldiers and rescue workers have evacuated stranded residents to the safety of relief camps and provided food to thousands of displaced people.
Pakistan’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 those of 2010 – the worst on record – when more than 2,000 people died and nearly a fifth of the country was under water.
Sherry Rehman, a senator and the country’s top climate official, said in a video posted on Twitter that Pakistan was experiencing a “serious climate catastrophe, one of the hardest in the decade”.
“We are at the moment at the ground zero of the frontline of extreme weather events, in an unrelenting cascade of heatwaves, forest fires, flash floods, multiple glacial lake outbursts, flood events, and now the monster monsoon of the decade is wreaking non-stop havoc throughout the country,” she said. The on-camera statement was retweeted by the country’s ambassador to the European Union.
The unprecedented monsoon season has affected more than 33 million people – one in seven Pakistanis – across all four of the country’s provinces. Nearly 300,000 homes have been destroyed, numerous roads rendered impassable, and electricity outages have been widespread.
Flooding from the Swat River overnight affected north-western Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where tens of thousands of people – especially in the Charsadda and Nowshehra districts – have been evacuated from their homes to relief camps set up in government buildings.
Officials said torrents of water were expected to reach the southern Sindh province in the next few days, adding misery to millions already affected by the floods, with a fresh deluge from swollen rivers in the north.
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 after record rains and glacier melt.
“Right now, Indus is in high flood,” said Aziz Soomro, the supervisor of a barrage that regulates the river’s flow near Sukkur.
