Islamabad: The death toll from the floods reached 1,061 on Monday while rising levels of the gushing Indus river threatened more deluges in the lower-lying plains of Punjab and Sindh provinces before emptying into the Arabian Sea. Data released by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) stated 1,600 people were injured and over 7,19,000 livestock had perished.
Pakistan finance minister Miftah Ismail said the floods have inflicted an estimated “loss of at least $10 billion” on the country. Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s climate change minister, said in a video that Pakistan is experiencing a “serious climate catastrophe, one of the hardest in the decade”. She said a third of Pakistan was under water as a result of flooding caused by record monsoon rains creating a crisis of “unimaginable proportions”. “It’s all one big ocean, there’s no dry land to pump the water out,” she said. “We are at the moment at ground zero of the front line of extreme weather events in a cascade of heatwaves, forest fires, flash floods, multiple glacial lake outbursts and now the monster monsoon of the decade.”
As experts blame climate change for the flooding, people are criticising government and local authorities for allowing builders to construct hotels and houses on the banks of rivers. “These hotels and markets block the natural waterways. Much of the devastation would have been avoided if we had not blocked the paths of rivers,” said Khaista Rehman, a resident of Kalam in Swat.
“I haven’t seen destruction of this scale, I find it difficult to put it into words. . . it is overwhelming,” Pakistan foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari said, adding that many crops that provided much of the population’s livelihoods had been wiped out. “Going forward, I’d expect not only the IMF, but the international community to grasp the level of devastation,” he said. Flooding from the Swat river had affected northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where thousands of people have been evacuated. Kamran Bangash, an official for the provincial government, said 180,000 people have been evacuated from villages in Charsadda and 150,000 from villages in Nowshera.
