Rescuers and neighbors are activating Tuesday to extract the dozens of bodies still prisoners from the rubble in Pakistan, where almost a week of torrential rains left almost 400 dead and. The monsoon will further intensify.
On Tuesday, on national television, General Inam Haider, president of the national disaster management authority, warned: ‘The episode of torrential rains will continue until Saturday’.
‘And another is expected at the end of the month’, he added, in a country where the 255 million inhabitants see extreme climatic phenomena multiply under the effect of climate change, according to scientists. In Dalori, the village most affected by the broken water carving mud and rocks on Monday, 19 inhabitants were certified dead, including the father of Oumar Islam, daily worker of 31 years.
‘In a few minutes, we lost everything, our lives are over,’ laments the man, surrounded by neighbors who try to console him. ‘No one had time to react: in 20 minutes our village was reduced to a bunch of ruins’, abounds Fazal Akbar, 37 years old.
‘Four hours’ before the arrival of the help
‘There have been calls from the loudspeaker of the mosque and residents began to come to help us, “he told AFP. These volunteers’ worked for four hours alone before the emergency services dispatched by the authorities arrived.
Their six excavators did not stop Tuesday to return the rubble, while everyone is busy to find the ten inhabitants who are still missing. Chiraz Ali, one of the heads of the rescuers, is pessimistic: ‘They have no chance of having survived.’
‘As for those who came out, they are seriously traumatized and need to be followed. We brought a psychiatrist yesterday but I will ask the local authorities to organize support for everyone ‘, he says. In the mountain village, between shattered concrete slabs and collapsed balconies, rescuers and volunteers distribute a hot meal, cookies and tea to residents still in shock.
Most spent the night searching the rubble in search of loved ones. Around, clothes, children’s toys and other utensils that surface in the rubble of crushed houses testify to the violence of the water torrent that fell from the sky on Monday morning. Rescuers improvise civil servants by recording the identities of the dead and missing on a piece of cardboard torn from a shoe box or even on the back of their hand.
The rains earn the south
Tuesday, the rain won other provinces. Until now more than 350 of the nearly 400 people have been identified at the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and almost all of the others in the rest of the north of the country. But now Balutchistan and Sindh, in the southern coastal, are also affected.
The Sindh chief meteorologist, Ameer Haider Laghari, said to AFP to redoubit ‘floods in major cities’ including Karachi, the country’s economic capital,’ because the infrastructure is in poor condition.
In neighboring Balutchistan already, ’40 to 50 houses have been damaged and the main highway to the Sindh was closed to heavy goods vehicles’ while 15 districts are subjected to various rains, reports the coordinator of the Local Disaster Management Agency, Mohammed Younis.
Since the start of the monsoon at the end of June, Islamabad has said that he had identified more than 700 dead and a thousand injured. And if the rains continue, warn the authorities, the heat – typical of the summer monsoon – remains strong, having the propagation of bacteria and epidemics fear, while stagnant water is synonymous with dengue wave in Pakistan each year.
/ATS