Floods affect 1.5 million in Pakistan

Arab News via AFP: Floods and heavy monsoon rains have now killed 178 people and affected 1.5 million across Pakistan in the last three weeks, disaster management officials said Sunday in updated figures. “At least 178 people have died and 1,503,492 others affected by recent monsoon rains and floods across Pakistan,” a senior National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) official told AFP.

He said that the rains had wounded 855 people, affected 5,615 villages and destroyed 20,312 houses all over the country. On Wednesday the figures stood at nearly one million people affected and 139 dead.

Nearly 350 relief camps have been set up to help people, mostly in the central province of Punjab, the southern province of Sindh and the southwestern province of Baluchistan, the official said. Further heavy monsoon rains are expected in Pakistan next month, but the NDMA is fully prepared, he said. Pakistan, which has suffered from monsoon floods for the last three years, has been criticized for not doing more to mitigate against the dangers posed by seasonal rains washing away homes and farmland.

Streets in all major cities including Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad suffer intermittent flooding due to downpours, damaging roads and homes....

From the December 2010 floods in Pakistan, shot by DFID - UK Department for International Development, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license