Pakistan Flooding: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa And Kashmir, Over 1300 Dead

by NowPublic Staff | July 30, 2010 at 07:30 am

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Pakistan's Northwest Hit By Monsoon Floods - Swat Valley Hit Hard, (video)

Update: Over 1300 Dead In Floods

Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is the worst hit province as over 567 houses were razed down to ground by flash floods, 90 highways were damaged, 58 big thoroughfares were closed for traffic; while, 104 people are still unaccounted for, Geo TV reported.

Up to one million people were affected, according to the United Nations, with thousands of homes and vast swathes of farmland destroyed in a region of Pakistan reeling from years of extremist bloodshed.

The death toll is rising in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region as flooding caused by heavy monsoon rains. Over 400 people are dead so far.

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Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, the head of the Pakistan meteorological department, told CNN the 300 mm, or 11.8 inches, of rain recorded in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is the most ever in Pakistan.

Many of the victims died when floodwaters swept away hundreds of mud houses in parts of Swat Valley and the districts of Shangla and Tank, according to Bashir Ahmed Bilour, a provincial minister in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The continued rains are hampering rescue efforts and combine with Pakistan's limited search and rescue resources the death toll may well increase.

...under-equipped rescue workers struggled to reach people stranded in far-flung villages. The weather forecast was mixed, with some areas expected to see reduced rainfall and others likely to see an intensification.