Pakistan ordered the immediate evacuation of up to 600,000 people from towns and villages along southern reaches of the Indus River as unprecedented monthlong floods swept toward the sea.
“We are sitting on the roof of our office now, waiting for vehicles to help evacuate us,” Sajad Ali Shah, a local government official, said by telephone from Shahdadkot, a city of 400,000 people in northern Sindh province, as water entered streets. “We need boats to pull out people stuck in areas where vehicles can no longer enter.” Public announcements urging people to leave were blaring from mosques, he said.
About 17.2 million people have lost homes and livelihoods to inundations that have killed 1,542 people, the United Nation’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said. Donors have given 60 per cent of $460 million needed to fund the emergency response, it said. While water levels have stopped rising or receded in places, as many as 800,000 victims are stranded in areas that can only be reached by air.
Around 340 kilometres to the south of Shahdadkot, floodwaters triggered an emptying of threatened low-lying areas close to the Indus delta.
“We need to evacuate around 200,000 people in the next four to six hours to safer areas,” Mirza Afzal, a Sindh Provincial Disaster Management Authority official, said by phone from the district of Thatta, 100 kilometres east of Karachi, the country’s biggest city.
Disease fight
“Everyone — the navy, police, local administration and even people who have bigger vehicles — is busy helping people out of here,” Afzal said.
Relief efforts have battled to keep pace as flood waters swamped up to a fifth of the country’s land — an area larger than England. About 3.5 million Pakistanis have only contaminated water for drinking, bathing and washing, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani met health officials, provincial leaders and international aid groups on August 24 to coordinate the fight against disease. Sixty-six disease outbreak alerts have been triggered since the floods began, the World Health Organization said, 61 of them for acute watery diarrhoea.
The majority of the health concerns have been centered in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where unprecedented monsoon storms in late July began the crisis and delivered a further blow to a region reeling from a year of war between the Pakistan army and Taliban militants.
IMF talks
With farmland inundated across Pakistan and roads and bridges washed away, economic growth may be slashed in half this year, according to Pakistani finance officials. Pakistani and International Monetary Fund representatives are meeting in Washington this week to discuss how to help the country cope with the economic challenge.
A deteriorating economy forced Pakistan to seek IMF help in 2008 to avoid defaulting on overseas debt. That loan was augmented in 2009 and extended through the end of this year.
The Asian Development Bank and the World Bank will lead an assessment of the damage caused by the flooding, the institutions said in a statement yesterday, after a request by Pakistan’s government.
