Pakistanis Flee Punjab City as Nation's Worst Floods Hit 12 Million People
Pakistan Forecasts More Rains
A. Majeed/AFP/Getty Images
Pakistani flood survivors queue food supplies in Nowshera. Pakistan’s army is leading the relief effort, evacuating people, distributing drinking water and food and repairing bridges and roads.
Pakistani flood survivors queue food supplies in Nowshera. Pakistan’s army is leading the relief effort, evacuating people, distributing drinking water and food and repairing bridges and roads. Photographer: A. Majeed/AFP/Getty Images
Pakistan’s Indus River and its tributaries flooded a city and surrounding farmlands in southern Punjab province, adding to 12 million people affected by the worst monsoon floods in the country’s history.
Pakistani television news channels showed residents fleeing the city and district of Muzaffargarh, between the Indus and Chenab rivers, after dikes ruptured, flooding rice and sugarcane fields. More than 3.5 million people may live in the district, one of the country’s poorest and most flood-vulnerable populations, according to 1998 census statistics.
The flooding has become “Pakistan’s worst national disaster,” Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said in a televised speech in the nearby city of Multan. On a tour of Sindh and Punjab, the country’s most populous provinces and its biggest agricultural zone, Gilani told reporters that the destruction of roads, bridges and towns has set Pakistan’s economic development back by years.
The high waters that scoured northwestern Pakistani river valleys beginning July 28 have rolled downstream to the Indus River plains that are the backbone of Pakistan’s economy. Continued rains are likely to induce “high to very high flood” levels along a 250-kilometer (160-mile) stretch of the Indus, from Tarbela, northwest of the capital, Islamabad, to Chashma in central Punjab, Pakistan’s weather office said on its website today. Heavy downpours may trigger flash inundations in northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Zardari Slammed
Cotton, rice, sugarcane and maize crops have been damaged and fruit orchards have been washed away, putting at risk the government’s farm output growth target of 3.8 percent for the year that started July 1.
President Asif Ali Zardari has been criticized by opponents for touring the U.K. and France last week while Pakistan battles the floods, which have killed 1,500 people, and injured or uprooted many more. “The death toll may rise to 2,000 because many dead bodies haven’t been recovered yet,” Abdus Sattar Edhi, founder of the Edhi Foundation, Pakistan’s biggest rescue service, said by telephone.
In Sindh, 2 million people were hit as the water flow in the Indus crossed one million cubic feet per second, 10 times the norm, Khair Mohammed Kalwar, director of operations at the Provincial Disaster Management Authority, said by telephone from Karachi today.
Floods have left many areas beyond outside help or communication, knocking out cellphone towers and ripping away roads.
Army Effort
Pakistan’s army is leading the relief effort, evacuating people, distributing drinking water and food and repairing bridges and roads, the military said on its website yesterday.
Cotton planted on 1.4 million acres was damaged in the Punjab and may lead to higher imports, according to the Pakistan Kissan Board, a farmers’ group. As much as 5 percent of the rice crop may be damaged, threatening the nation’s export target of 4.2 million metric tons, Malik Jahangir, president of the Rice Exporters Association of Pakistan, said by telephone last week.
Farmers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa lost 35 billion rupees ($408 million) worth of crops, the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan reported, citing a preliminary government report.
To contact the reporters on this story: Anwar Shakir in Peshawar at Ashakir1@bloomberg.net; Khurrum Anis in Karachi at Kkhan14@bloomberg.net.
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