Torrential rain wreaked havoc in Quetta, killing four children and damaging several houses, officials said on Wednesday, while another 17 perished in heavy rain and floodwater in Sindh. Reports said several areas were waterlogged after heavy rainfall in Quetta due to poor sanitation system. Rainwater also entered several houses in low-lying areas of the city. In Sindh, unprecedented rains and floods continued to cause widespread devastation in the province’s interior, with the death toll climbing to around 200 by Wednesday.
In Naushero Feroze, influential people created breaches in streams to save their lands, leaving several villages submerged and people stranded, a private news channel reported. One such incident occurred in Phal union council. The situation is turning worse in Badin also, where office-bearers of the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC) appealed to the United Nation Organisation, international donors and the government machinery to take emergency measures to provide relief to flood-stricken population.
Displaced: Kashif Bajeer, SPARC national programme manager, said people had been badly affected in Mirpurkhas, Badin, Tando Muhammad Khan, Tharparkar, Umerkot, Sanghar, Matyrari, Tando Allahyar, Dadu and Hyderabad districts. He said business activities were at a halt, adding that rain and flood had displaced more than 10 million people, while thousands of mud houses had been damaged. He claimed that more than 200 people had died by Wednesday in Mirpurkhas, 160 in Badin, 50 in Tharparkar, more than 150 in Sanghar and about 100 in Tando Muhammad Khan. Badin District Coordination Officer Kazim Hussain Jatoi said around 1,021,301 people had been badly affected by torrential rain in the district. He said that 46 union councils and 6,395 villages in the district had been badly damaged and the current summary of losses further revealed that 984,805 acres of land had been affected. More than 1,400 people had been moved to safety from Badin’s flood-ravaged areas of Tarai, Pingrio and Khoski, the Pakistan Navy said. Reports said the government, army and UN donor agencies had geared up relief activities in affected areas of Sindh. The devastating rain and floods have so far washed away 64,000 livestock, inundated four million acres of land and destroyed standing crops over 2.5 million acres of land. In Karachi, the prevalent spell of monsoon rain has stopped, but stagnant rainwater could not been drained out due to the negligence of the authorities. Rainwater was still accumulated in Saddar Town, Mehmoodabad, DHA and various other low-lying areas of Karachi and all educational institutions remained closed, as there was little traffic that plied the city’s roads. Older parts of the city were still submerged in rainwater, including Kharadar, Bohra Pir, Garden, Saddar, Railway Colony and Korangi. Meanwhile, the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) forecast scattered rain and thundershowers with isolated heavy falls for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, upper Punjab and Kashmir in the next 24 hours.
