Multan: Pakistani troops Thursday rushed to protect two major cities from raging floodwaters, using explosives to divert swollen rivers in a crisis which has hit more than a million people and inundated swathes of farmland.
The floods and landslides from days of heavy monsoon rains have claimed more than 200 lives in Pakista, with hospitals struggling to cope with the disaster.
The floodwaters are moving downstream through Pakistan’s Punjab province, a key agricultural area and the country’s most prosperous area.
The army on Thursday planted explosives to blow three strategic dykes to divert waters away from the southern Punjab cities of Muzaffargarh and Multan, a major agricultural centre and the main hub for Pakistan’s important cotton industry.
Similar drastic measures were taken on Wednesday to protect the city of Jhang, further upstream, where 10,000 people were evacuated overnight, according to senior rescue official Rizwan Naseer.
Hafiz Shaukat Ali, a senior administration official in Multan, said all schools in the area would be closed for the next two days.
The military, which often plays an important role in disaster relief efforts, said troops had rescued 22,000 people stranded by floodwaters around Punjab and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
The country’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said 257 people had been killed and more than 1.1 million affected — a figure that includes both those stranded at home and those who fled after the floods hit.
Troops used helicopters and boats to evacuate thousands of marooned people from the country’s plains where raging monsoon floods inundated more villages Thursday.
Flash floods have washed away crops, damaged tens of thousands of homes and affected over a million people since September 3, when heavy monsoon rains lashed Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province and Kashmir, the Himalayan region claimed by both India and Pakistan.
Sharif’s assurance
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited the Pakistan-administered portion of Kashmir on Thursday and told flood victims that his government would do whatever it can to rebuild their damaged homes. “I am grieved over the deaths caused by the floods,” he said in a televised speech.
Ahmad Kamal, a spokesman for Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority, said 261 people have been killed and 482 injured in Pakistan. “The situation is still alarming as flood waters are entering the country’s plains in the Jhang district, inundating more villages and affecting thousands,” he said.
The military said it was expanding relief operations in Punjab, where the Chenab River overflowed. Troops in helicopters and boats evacuated 4,000 more people from Jhang, it said.
Kamal said high floods were likely to reach the southern Sindh province later this week.
Authorities were supplying tents, food and other items to survivors, but many complained that the government was not doing enough. “I feel as If I am a beggar, as I have to wait for hours to get free food,” a survivor told a Pakistani news channel.
Hafiz Saeed, who heads Jamaat-ud-Dawa, an anti-India charity, accused India of releasing flood waters that caused destruction in Pakistan.
“Pakistan should take notice of this situation,” he told a Pakistani news channel late Wednesday, adding that he was providing food to hundreds of thousands of flood victims in Jhang.
Pakistan has suffered deadly floods around the same time every year since 2010, when the country was hit by the worst inundations in its history.
The waters that year swamped 160,000 square kilometres of land — an area bigger than England — and cost the country nearly $10 billion (Dh36.7 billion), the equivalent of 6.5 per cent of GDP. Around 1,800 people were killed and 20 million affected.
But an analysis by Topline Securities, a Karachi-based investment company, said this year’s floods do not appear to be on the same scale.
“Seeing the preliminary numbers ... reported by NDMA, magnitude of the flood looks like 2012 and 2013, but much lower than 2010,” the report said.
The floods of 2012 killed nearly 600 people and affected 4.6 million, while those in 2013 killed around 300 and affected some 1.5 million.
