Floods in southeastern Pakistan kill 88

[News_Editor]

Floods in southeastern Pakistan kill 88

2011-09-05 04:22:59 GMT+7 (ICT)

ISLAMABAD (BNO NEWS) -- Torrential monsoon rains have in recent days killed at least 88 people and affected millions more in southeastern Pakistan, the country's National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) reported on Sunday.

The agency said the recent floods have mostly affected Sindh province where 80 percent of banana, sugar cane and cotton crops have been destroyed and nearly 100,000 cattle heads are dead or missing. The NDMA, which is providing food to almost four million affected people, warned that flood waters may take two to three months to dry.

Zaffar Qadir, chairman of the NDMA, said about 50 persons were killed in lower Sindh districts, according to Ary News. He said that teams of NDMA had gone to the affected parts of Sindh, including Mirpurkhas, Tharparkar, Badin, Hyderabad and other districts where a new spell of heavy rainfall, which started on August 30, continued to pour down causing flash floods.

Many local roads which connected different parts of Sindh are completely inaccessible due to flood waters, while scores of small cities and towns have been disconnected from communication systems of the major cities, Ary News reported.

In early August, torrential rains also wrecked havoc in most parts of the province of Sindh, killing at least 18 people and leaving dozens more injured. Some areas saw the worst rainfall since at least 1936.

And in late July 2010, above-average heavy monsoon rains in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan regions killed approximately 2,000 people and affected around 20 million others. It was the country's worst flooding in modern history.

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