At least 23 more people lost their lives when the walls and roofs of their dilapidated houses
collapsed and fell on them. The deaths were reported from Larkana, Shikarpur, Khairpur, Jacobabad, Qambar, Ghotki, Kandhkot, Dadu, Sukkur, Jamshoro, Sanghar and other districts of Sindh which have received unprecedented heavy downpours in the current spell.
With the deaths of 23 people, mostly children and women, the death toll of the past four days in different districts of the province rose to 220. More than 80 percent of deaths have been reported in Larkana and Sukkur divisions, according to officials and local activists people in these regions mostly use clay, mud and unbaked bricks for the construction of their houses and other structures, which crumble when rain and floodwaters come.
The stagnant water and continuous rains in the upper parts of Sindh are taking a heavy toll on human lives. Having found no relief from the high-ups of the Sindh government, the infuriated affected people staged demonstrations in many towns of different districts to register their protest against their apparent failure to drain out water from marooned localities and villages. Talking to media persons, the protesters, who blocked roads in different towns of most of the affected districts, said that due to the apathy of both the officials and their elected representatives their houses and other structures were collapsing and people are left stranded in their villages.
They said that tens of thousands of people who had taken shelter at safer places had been living in subhuman conditions due to the unavailability of basic facilities. They lamented that they neither had food nor safe drinking water at their so-called relief camps after they moved there leaving their inundated houses to save their lives.
The officials of the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA), in their daily report on Sunday, said that so far around 1.3 million people have been affected while during the past 24 hours 39 people lost their lives in rain-related incidents in different districts. They informed that crops on more than 1.1 million acres of land had been damaged.
The heavy rains have brought another catastrophe for the people, with people in a number of districts carrying the dead bodies of their near and dear ones to remote areas for burial. The heirs of the deceased people on Sunday were forced to carry the bodies to sandy areas of desert regions in Tharparkar, Umerkor, Sanghar and Khairpur districts after their ancestral graveyards came under the thigh-high water.
The family members of one Saeed Ahmed, who died in a village near Mirpurkhas, took his body to the famous necropolis at the shrine of Syed Raazi Shah near Naukot Fort. “The graveyards of our area have been inundated so we have to take this body there to bury it under the sands of the graveyard in Tharparkar district,” family members told MinuteMirror. Similar stories were reported from other flood-hit districts where people have been left with no option but to take the bodies away either to desert regions or to hilly areas of Dadu, Jamshoro and Thatta districts.
Ayaz Latif Palijo, Dr. Qadir Magsi, Syed Zain Shah, Riaz Chandio and other leaders of the Sindh Action Committee expressed their anger and indignation on the alleged poor performance of the functionaries of the Sindh government and requested the high-ups
of the federal government and Chief Justice of Pakistan to take strong notice of the catastrophic conditions in most parts of the province.
Thousands of the people living along both embankments of the Left Bank Outfall Drain (LBOD) have been in a state of terror due to the rising flows in the biggest drain of the country at different RDs (reduced distances). Officials who have been tasked with
looking after the flows of water in LBOD fear that it might develop breaches at some vulnerable points due to the onrush of water due to continuous rains in Shaheed Benazirabad and Sanghar districts. They said it was carrying more rainwater than its
designed capacity towards the Arabian Sea.
Comments are closed.