The Pakistan National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has said that the death toll from ravaging monsoon floods in the country since June has reached 1,033, with 119 people dying in the last 24 hours.
This is even as several countries, including Qatar and Iran, have pledged emergency support in the wake of a deluge which has been described as a “humanitarian disaster of epic proportions”.
The NDMA warned of “very high” level flooding in some areas alongside the Kabul and Indus Rivers, particularly in Nowshera in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province and Kalabagh and Chashma in Punjab province.
According to reports, large parts of the country remain submerged – particularly the provinces of Balochistan, KP and Sindh in the south – as heavy rains continue to lash parts of the country.
Read also: Thousands displaced as flood hits Jigawa Community
While an estimated 347 people have died in Sindh, 238 people have died in Balochistan and226 have died in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Houses reduced to rubble.
In her reaction, a Pakistani senator and the country’s top climate official, Sherry Rehman said that the country is experiencing a “serious climate catastrophe, one of the hardest in the decade”.
“We are at the moment at the ground zero of the front line 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 was quoted as saying.
Officials in the country said that this year’s catastrophic flooding has affected more than 33 million people – one in seven Pakistanis – destroying crops, livestock, and nearly a million homes.
The NDMA is quoted to have said that more than 809,000 hectares (two million acres) of cultivated crops have been wiped out, 3,451 kilometres (2,150 miles) of roads destroyed, and 149 bridges washed away.
Story was adapted from Aljazeera.
