How the flooding crisis became so awful.
How the flooding crisis became so awful.
Flash floods over the weekend left one-third of Pakistan submerged from weeks of heavy rains, compounding an already difficult set of political and economic crises in the country.
The catastrophic flooding has affected 33 million people, about 15 percent of the population, according to Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority. More than 1,130 people have been killed since June’s monsoon season began, and at least 75 died in the past day. There has been $10 billion of damage and an estimated 1 million homes wrecked.
“There was a super flood in 2010, but this is the worst ever in the history of Pakistan,” Shabnam Baloch, the country director for Pakistan at the International Rescue Committee, told me. “The type of catastrophe we are seeing at the moment is just indescribable. I don’t even have the right words to put it in a way that people can visualize it.”
The country’s south has been most affected, notably the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan. Though some degree of flooding is common in Pakistan during monsoon season, the intensity of the rainfall this month was 780 percent above average, according to Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman.
“More than 100 bridges and some 3,000 km of roads have been damaged or destroyed, nearly 800,000 farm animals have perished, and two million acres of crops and orchards have been hit,” the United Nations’ World Food Program noted. The scale of flooding has impeded access for emergency groups seeking to get aid to the neediest.
This calamity alone would have been disastrous. But Pakistan this year has also endured economic difficulties and a lethal heat wave that, as Vox’s Umair Irfan reported, strained public infrastructure and social services. All these crises have been exacerbated by the country’s political situation, with the government targeting the recent ousted prime minister, Imran Khan, and by the global economic plight.
“Pakistan has faced a series of crises this year: economic, political, now, a natural disaster,” Madiha Afzal, a foreign policy researcher at the Brookings Institution, told me. “Running underneath all of this has been the political crisis.” Pakistan’s political crises, all too briefly explained
Early this year, a political crisis rattled Pakistan. While the immediate crisis was resolved, the underlying tensions remain, and if anything, have become even more polarized — creating a political conflict that may affect the way the country addresses these floods.
