The state of emergency was declared on Friday in the country, particularly vulnerable to climate change, where more than 33 million people were “hard affected” by bad weather.
Le Monde with AFP
“I have never seen such floods in my life,” says Rahim Bakhsh Brohi, a farmer interviewed by the France-Presse agency, in a country yet used to the violence of bad weather. The state of emergency was declared on Friday August 26 in Pakistan on Friday, August 26, plagued by monsoon rains of exceptional intensity which affected more than 33 million inhabitants.
More than 900 people have been killed, including 34 in recent 24 hours, due to the monsoon rains that started in June, said the National Catastrophes Management Agency (NDMA) on Friday. The material damage is catastrophic. Nearly 220,000 houses have been fully destroyed, and 500,000 seriously damaged, detailed the NDMA.
The monsoon, which usually lasts from June to September, is essential for the irrigation of plantations and to reconstruct the water resources of the Indian subcontinent. But it also brings its share of dramas and destruction each year.
The Specter of Floods of 2010
According to the authorities, these bad weather is comparable to those of 2010, record year in which 2,000 people had been killed and almost a fifth of the country submerged by the rains.
A Sukkur, in the Sind province (south), particularly affected, the inhabitants try to make their way through the muddy streets cluttered with the debris carried by the bad weather. Like thousands of inhabitants of rural areas in search of a shelter, Brohi tried to find refuge on the raised national road, a rare place spared by the floods. Some 80,000 hectares of agricultural land were destroyed in this only province.
The Minister of Climate Change, Sherry Rehman, who had spoken, on Wednesday, of a disaster of “a rare magnitude”, launched, on Friday, a call for international aid.
Pakistan is particularly vulnerable to climate change. It appears in eighth position of the countries most threatened by extreme weather phenomena, according to a study by the NGO Germanwatch.
At the start of the year, a large part of the country was plagued by a heat wave, with up to 51 ° C recorded in Jacobabad, in the Sind province. Today, this city is affected by floods that have damaged houses, swept away routes and bridges.
“I flew over the disaster area and I have no words to express what I saw,” said Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, after a visit to Sukkur on television. He canceled his trip to Great Britain in order to supervise rescue operations and ordered the army to devote himself entirely to rescue operations.
Army officers will also have to pay a month’s salary in the face of losses caused by the disaster and a call to donations has been launched.
The regions of Balutchistan (west) and Sind (south) are the most affected, even if the torrential rains have concerned almost the whole of Pakistan. Videos posted on social networks on Friday showed buildings, installed near flood rivers, as well as bridges, destroyed by the waves.
Horrifying Footage from S. #pakistan Today of Entiire Building Washed Away by Flouds. Over 935 People Killed, More t… https://t.co/qsfhcfus0n
a shaman, near the border with Afghanistan, displaced advanced in muddy water arriving until the size due to the rupture of a nearby dam.
a Quetta, capital of the province of Balutchistan, the railway lines were cut following the damage suffered by a bridge. Most telephony and internet services networks have been interrupted, according to the telecommunications authority which qualified the situation as “unpublished”.