According to Pakistan’s climate change minister, a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportions” is underway
Pakistan’s Minister of Climate Change Sherry Rehman told the Reuters news agency that the flood disaster has affected the lives of up to 33 million people. This means that one in seven Pakistanis will suffer from the effects of the natural phenomenon.
Floods brought by monsoon rains have cut off the main connections to the western province of Balochistan. A major bridge on the railway leading to its capital, Quetta, collapsed.
In addition, landslides and damage to bridges have blocked four highways leading to the area.
Water masses have damaged half a million houses and almost 150 bridges have been destroyed. According to NDMA, Pakistan’s disaster management authority, more than 80,000 homes have been damaged in one day.
Interruption of transport connections slows down relief work.
“Our homes have become landfills”
According to OCHA, the UN humanitarian aid coordinating office, at least 184,000 people have had to seek shelter in tent camps.
Pakistan has appealed to the international community to provide shelter to those who lost their homes due to the flood. The need is a million tents.
More than 900 people have already died in accidents caused by the monsoon flood, a third of them children.
Messages from the disaster area are desperate. A mother had to stay in a rickshaw cart with her children after her house changed
– Where can we go? The streets are flooded, and the garden is full of dirty water. Our homes and alleys have become dumping grounds for floating waste, the woman described the situation to the news agency Reuters.
He said that it had been raining in the area for three months already.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my life”
The monsoon flood now afflicting Pakistan has been compared to the devastation of 2010, when more than two thousand people were killed and almost a fifth of the country was covered in water.
– I have never seen such a flood in my life, said the elderly farmer Rahim Bakhsh Brohi for news agency AFP.
Like thousands of others, he had been forced to climb the embankment of the highway, like the few dry islands emerging from the floodwaters.
The annual monsoon rains water crops and are part of the cycle of nature along the Indian Ocean, but they also cause destruction.
This year, extreme weather events, and the early summer heat turning into prolonged floods, have put Pakistan in a state of emergency.