Sunday, September 14, 2014

Indian Kashmir city 'in ruins' after floods

Space Daily via AFP: The main city in Indian Kashmir has "drowned completely" under floodwaters, a senior official said Friday, with the deadly inundation now affecting about two million people in neighbouring Pakistan and threatening its all-important cotton industry.

The floods began in Kashmir after heavy monsoon rains and are now progressing downstream through Pakistan, inundating thousands of villages and large areas of important farmland in the country's breadbasket.

More than 450 people have been killed and Pakistan's Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said just shy of two million people have been affected by the floodwaters -- a figure that includes both those stranded at home and those who fled after the floods hit.

More than 140,000 people have been evacuated from towns and villages around Punjab, Pakistan's richest and most populous province.

Authorities have made plans to blast holes in strategic dykes to divert the turbid brown floodwaters away from Multan, a city of two million inhabitants and the nerve centre of Pakistan's cotton and textiles industry, a vital export earner...

A flood zone map of India, map created by PlaneMad, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

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