Half A Million People Evacuating Thatta Towns

HYDERABAD: Score of villages in Thatta district were inundated on Thursday after floodwaters broke though dykes of Thatta loop canal at Sajawal, forcing thousands of people to evacuate the areas.

After the swollen Indus River broke through the Sur Jani embankment in Thatta, authorities today ordered nearly half a million people to evacuate Sujawal, Mirpur Bathoro and Daro towns.

The raging torrents are threatening further havoc in the country straining to cope after its worst humanitarian disaster in 80 years. Villagers in Thatta at south of the Sindh fled from where the Indus delta merges towards the Arabian Sea, trailing north in vans laden with furniture or crowded into buses, or in carts pulled by oxen. Some people were on foot, leading their livestock.

Water lined the road from Hyderabad to Thatta town, as workers frantically used bulldozers to dig embankments only just higher than the flooding, and where people camped out under open skies or in makeshift tents.

The catastrophe has affected more than 17 million people and left eight million dependent on aid to survive. The government has confirmed 1,600 people dead and 2,366 wounded, but officials warn that millions are at risk from diseases and food shortages. ”

We have warned people of Sujawal, Mirpur Bathoro and Daro towns to leave for safer places in view of possible flooding there,” Hadi Bakhsh Kalhoro, the senior official in Thatta district, told AFP. “The three towns have an approximate population of 400,000,” he said. On the Arabian Sea, authorities fear that coastal districts may flood in coming days, trapped by Indus river floods pushing south and rough seas. In North of the Sindh, the Shahdadkot city is facing threat of inundation after water seepage from levee of a huge sim nullah near the city.

Authorities say the densely populated city have been evacuated in wake of any possible threat of deluge. The Sindh irrigation minister said waters were also mounting pressure on a protective embankment in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh village, where former leaders Benazir Bhutto and her father, as well as her two younger brothers, are buried. “We have strengthened the embankment because we don’t want mausoleums of our martyrs to be flooded,” the provincial minister, Saifullah Dharejo, told AFP.

The United Nations warned that 800,000 people in desperate need of aid had been cut off by the deluge across the country and appealed for more helicopters to deliver supplies to those people reachable only by air. Officials warned yet more Pakistanis could be affected in the fertile southern plains of Sindh province, which face the risk of further flooding in the next few days as the major Indus river threatens to burst its banks.