Pakistan floods: desperation as rain continues
Updated on 07 August 2010
Flood victims in Pakistan throw themselves at army helicopters as heavy rainfall continues and anger at the government grows. Channel 4 News's Jonathan Miller in Pakistan, says aid is desperately needed.
The death toll has now risen to 1,600 people, as 12 million are directly affected by the floods ravaging the country.
Aid workers in Pakistan said the disaster is getting worse by the day. A member of Médicins Sans Frontières in Pakistan told Channel 4 News: "It is raining again today - it seems to get worse every day. More areas are flooded – and there are still those that were affected from the first day. The magnitude of the disaster is gigantic."
The UN says it is a race against time to reach the unreachable, and feed the unfeedable, as people remain stranded as heavy rains continue.
Exasperated aid workers told Channel 4 News Foreign Affairs Correspondent Jonathan Miller the situation is now "beyond human control" as they are unable to deliver vital supplies to those affected.
The Pakistani army is now coordinating the relief effort and 2,000 troops have been deployed to "wage war on the water" as Pakistani army helicopters patrol the region plucking victims from the roofs of houses.
In the town of Muzaffargarh, near where rivers bloated with rain from as far away as Afghanistan and India merge with the Indus to flow south to the sea, army helicopters dropped packets of rice to people who had moved to higher ground to a cemetery.
Some latched on to helicopter skids as the aircraft took off. An elderly man fought his way inside one. He looked down and wept.
"Things are getting worse. It's raining again. That's hampering our relief work," said U.N. World Food Programme spokesman Amjad Jamal.
Districts in southern Sindh province were on high alert today as the water surged down the Indus river basin. The authorities in Pakistan have evacuated half a million people from the province.
Floods have already devastated Pakistan's northwest corner as monsoon rains continue to fall generating the region's worst floods since 1929.
Over the weekend, it is predicted that floodwaters could heavily damage the mainly rural areas of Sindh after roaring down from the northwest and through the central agricultural heartland of Punjab, along a path at least 1,000 km (621 miles) long.
Michael O'Brien, of the Red Cross in Islamabad, told Channel 4 News yesterday that relief workers were having problems getting to some of the areas hit by the flooding.
"The problem is the devastation is so severe in some areas, for instance in the Swat Valley every single bridge has been destroyed so it is extremely difficult simply to get to places to assess the scale of the damage, let alone to manage to get relief to these people," he said.
A disaster of this scale needs a response from the international community, and that in itself provides some coordination challenges.
An appeal launched by the Disasters and Emergencies Committee (DEC) on Thursday has already raised £2.5m and the US government has pledged $35m (£22.2m) to the crisis.
DEC says its members and their partners have helped 300,000 survivors, providing emergency medical care, clean water, food and shelter.
Meanwhile, criticism of Pakistan's absent president Asif Zardari is increasing.
Despite the floods being the worst to affect the country since its formation, Mr Zardari has decided to stay in Europe.
Mr Zardari held talks with Prime Minister David Cameron at Chequers yesterday leaving Pakistan's prime minister Yusuf Raza Gilani to lead the government's response to the floods.
"There is a chief executive at home ... The parliament is in session, the Senate is in session, it's the prime minister's responsibility and he's fulfilling his responsibility," Zardari told BBC's Newsnight.
Addressing the nation for the first time since the disaster struck, Mr Gilani described the loss of human life and infrastructure as "colossal" and appealed for even more international help as forecasters predicted a grim picture for the weekend.
Neighbouring India is also experiencing flash floods, with an estimed 88 people being killed and 200 injured in the Ladakh region of the disputed Kashmir province.
Indian officials said dozens of people were still missing after the floods, which were triggered by unexpectedly heavy rain.
