Impact of Pakistan floods equal to 3 disasters

THE Pakistan floods could affect more people than the world’s last three great disasters combined, the UN warned yesterday.

It said the toll could exceed the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

Deaths in each of those were much higher than the 1,500 people killed so far in the floods that first hit Pakistan two weeks ago. But the Pakistani government estimates that over 13 million people have been affected – 2m more than the other disasters combined.

The comparison helps frame the scale of the crisis, which has overwhelmed the Pakistani government and has generated widespread anger from flood victims who have complained that aid is not reaching them quickly enough or at all.

“It looks like the number of people affected in this crisis is higher than the Haiti earthquake, the tsunami or the Pakistan earthquake, and if the toll is as high as the one given by the government, it’s higher than the three of them combined,” a spokesman for the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.

The UN has provided a lower number of people who have been affected in Pakistan, about 6m, but does not dispute the government’s figure. The UN number does not include the southern province of Sindh, which has been hit by floods in recent days, and the two sides have slightly different definitions of what it means to be affected.

The total number of people affected in the three other large disasters that have hit in recent years is about 11m – 5m in the tsunami and 3m in each of the earthquakes.

Many of the people affected by the floods, caused by extremely heavy monsoon rains, were located in Pakistan’s north-western province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Rescue workers have been unable to reach up to 600,000 people marooned in the province’s Swat Valley, where many were still trying to recover from an intense battle between the army and the Taliban last spring.

Hundreds of thousands of people have also had to flee rising floods in recent days in the central and southern provinces of Punjab and Sindh as heavy rains have continued to pound parts of the country.

One affected resident, Manzoor Ahmed, said that although he managed toescape floods that submerged villages anddestroyed homes in Sindh, the total lack of government help meant dying may have been a better alternative.

Thousands of people in the neighbouring districts of Shikarpur and Sukkur camped out on roads, bridges and railway tracks – any dry ground they could find – often with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.