Pakistan faces risk of further flooding
By Matthew Green in Islamabad
Published: August 3 2010 15:33 | Last updated: August 3 2010 15:33
Pakistan was braced on Tuesday for the risk of fresh flooding amid fears that a deluge of monsoon rain that uprooted over 1m people in the rugged northwest will cause further havoc in more populous lowland provinces.
Aid workers estimate that more than 1,400 people nationwide have been killed and three million forced from their homes by the worst floods to hit Pakistan in almost a century, but they are still struggling to gain a clear picture of the scale of the crisis."In the initial stages it wasn't apparent to everybody what the magnitude of this catastrophe was," said Mike O'Brien, of the International Committee of the Red Cross. "This is a national catastrophe. The flood waters that have hit the north-west are already starting to affect other parts of the country."
Much of the relief effort of the past few days has focused on the north-western Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, which bore the brunt of the torrential rain and where tens of thousands of people were cut off by rising waters. Flash floods swept away entire villages without warning.
The Swat Valley and surrounding areas, where an estimated 2m people were driven from their homes by fighting between Pakistan's army and Taliban insurgents last year, have been among the hardest hit.
"We are now in a race against time to avert a public health disaster. The countryside is drowning in an ocean of contaminated water," said Neva Khan, the country director of Oxfam, the relief agency. "There are queues and queues of people waiting for clean drinking water."
Relief agencies fear that the downhill movement of the water through river systems snaking into the eastern Punjab and southern Sindh provinces, where most of Pakistan's people live, could combine with fresh downpours to worsen the devastation. They hope, however, that people will have time to move to higher ground, avoiding the rapid loss of life that hit the country last week.
Waters were rising on Tuesday in parts of Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province, which suffered an initial bout of flooding in late July. Estimates for the number of people forced from their homes in Punjab range from 180,000 to more than 800,000, illustrating the difficulty officials face in assessing the situation.
Authorities are telling residents in the southern Sindh Province, home to Karachi, the commercial capital, to evacuate flood-prone areas. The Indus river has risen to its highest levels in more than a century, according to Pakistani media. Parts of Kashmir, the western Baluchistan province and Pakistan's tribal belt have also been hit.
Relief workers have mobilised a humanitarian infrastructure that was set up to cope with the affects of the fighting between Taliban insurgents and the army in north-west Pakistan, but do not have the same resources in place in other parts of the country.
The growing magnitude of the crisis is testing the resources of Pakistan's military and its weak coalition government. Asif Ali Zardari, the country's president, who began an official visit to the UK on Tuesday, has faced criticism from survivors who are still awaiting help. An outbreak of political violence that killed several dozen people in Karachi following the assassination of a prominent politician on Monday has added to his government's woes.
While boats and helicopters continue to ferry survivors to safety, attention is also turning to the potential long-term effects of the floods. Relief workers are trying to assess the extent of the damage to crops, fearing there could be a significant shortfall in the next harvest. Reports suggest that food prices have already soared by as much as 300 per cent in parts of the Swat Valley, among the worst hit areas.
Torrents have washed away dozens of bridges and highways, inflicting massive damage to infrastructure.