Floods affect 700,000 in Balochistan: Officials
At least 51 people have died across the province and Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf on Sunday declared three districts as calamity-hit areas.
He announced assistance worth Rs2.6 billion for relief and rehabilitation work in the province where a torrential monsoon spell this month smashed a 30-year record, they said.
Heavy rains lashed the province for 32 hours on September 11 and the meteorological department recorded 432 millimetres of rain, head of the provincial disaster management authority Akbar Durrani told AFP.
Officials released the figures almost two weeks after the rains hit the sparsely populated province.
Flash floods damaged crops over 380,000 acres of land in 13 districts, he said adding that the worst hit were Jaffarabad, Naseerabad and Jhal Magsi, where a large area remains submerged.
At least 22 people have died in Naseerabad alone and eight in Jafffarabad, Durrani said. The remaining casualties were reported elsewhere in the province.
Another 115 people were injured in the rains which also killed 1,778 cattle.
Around 700,000 people have been affected, many people suffered crop and property losses, Durrani said.
"We have already distributed 6,670 tents and 2,378 metric tons of food items, while the prime minister promised to immediately rush 20,000 more tents," he said.
The government has set up several medical camps where treatment has been offered to nearly 3,000 people suffering gastrointestinal diseases and more than 2,500 cases of malaria.
"We have not launched any appeal for foreign assistance. We are so far relying on own resources and we hope we can handle the situation," Durrani said.
He stressed the rescue work is over and rehabilitation work including repair of roads and infrastructure has started.
He said the level of disaster was much less than 2010, when unprecedented monsoon rains triggered catastrophic flooding across the country, killing almost 1,800 people and affecting 21 million.
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Lucky the army can come in and help by responding rapidly, i wonder how an independent Baluchistan would handle it?
A friend of mine, great fan of PML (N) was advocating his party case, look what we have done, we made motorway, we explode nukes, we gave poor farmers of Sind land, we gave yellow cabs, we did this and that. I said to him, look nobody done nothing for Pakistan, everybody when came made false promises and when left we heard about his immense wealth, nobody worked for Pakistan, Like Quran, Almighty is taking care of this land. When I told him that it will take three or four year to announce Kala Bagh Dam he asked why I am sure about this. I told him, look every generation has a particular psychology and every generation defend its way of living and its way of thinking. If today American are asking their government for hyper sonic jets, mission on Mars, and atomic aircraft carriers it’s because of demand of their psychology. Some time Almighty change psychology of certain generation suddenly, as he did in WWII, now in Europe nobody can even talk about war, same way Almighty is changing the psychology of Sindhi people, they are enjoying water for past three years and in next two or three years they will fed up even from the name of water and they will insist on building dams and then if someone inaugurated Kala Bagh Dam kindly then give credit to Almighty.
700,000!? thats half of the total population of balochistan!! (around 1,400,000)