Pakistan looks ‘like a sea’ after devastating floods, says PM Sharif

Many parts of Pakistan appear “like a sea,” Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Wednesday following a visit to some of the flood-hit areas in the southern province of Sindh.

“You wouldn't believe the scale of destruction there,” Sharif said on Wednesday after a visit to the worst-hit areas of the province. "It is water everywhere as far as you could see. It is just like a sea."

The prime minister said receding waters threaten a new challenge in the form of water-born infectious diseases.

The government, which has boosted cash handouts for flood victims to 70 billion Pakistani rupees (about $313.90 million), will buy 200,000 tents to house the displaced, he said. "We will need trillions of rupees to cope with this calamity."

The floods were brought by record monsoon rains and glacier melt in Pakistan’s northern mountains.

Raging floods and water spillover from Pakistan's largest freshwater lake threaten several districts of Sindh with a population of over five million.

The government has already engineered two intentional breaches of Lake Manchar’s retaining wall in an effort to ease pressure on the structure.

Due to a particularly intense monsoon season, about one-third of Pakistan’s landmass has been submerged. As many as 33 million of a population of 220 million has been affected in a natural disaster that has left hundreds of thousands homeless.

The government says over 1,340 people have been killed, 1.2 million homes have been destroyed and property damage is expected to reach $10 billion. National disaster officials said at least 18 people, including eight children, were among the dead in the past 24 hours.

With more rain expected in the coming month, circumstances could worsen, a top official of the United Nations' refugee agency (UNHCR) has warned.

The World Health Organization has said more than 6.4 million people need humanitarian support in the flooded areas.

Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said on September 1 that the floods are “a climate disaster of biblical proportions.”

“Pakistanis at this point in time, are paying in their lives and in their livelihoods for a climate disaster that is not of their making.”

SS