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Millions still without shelter as Pakistan becomes living hell
The Australian - August 19, 2010
Amanda Hodge, South Asia Correspondent – Millions of flood-affected Pakistanis were still living without any shelter yesterday.
This was even as new areas of the country's south were placed on acute flood alert and officials in the northwest warned of a looming famine.
And in militant areas also inundated by floodwaters yet another deadly peril emerged with reports that at least four people – three of them children – had been injured in recent days by floating improvised explosive devices.
In the Islamic calendar's holiest month, Pakistan has become a living hell with 20 million people – equivalent to almost the entire population of Australia – affected by the country's worst natural disaster in a century. Six million of them are without clean water.
Three weeks after the floods hit, there is still no sign the disaster has peaked. International aid money continued to dribble in yesterday with the UN announcing it had reached almost half the targeted $460 million it estimated was required to provide immediate relief.
But other aid groups, including the UN children's fund UNICEF, warned they had nowhere near the money required to meet the immediate needs of flood victims who, with every passing day, were at greater risk of serious diseases, such as cholera, or death.
"Two million dollars are needed every day to provide water – this is not sustainable," UNICEF regional director Daniel Toole said. "We don't have $2m a day."
Desperate villagers have begun mobbing aid trucks distributing food through stricken areas.
The Emergency Shelter Cluster, a coalition of 40 local and international aid groups working furiously to provide emergency shelter, said it had so far delivered 98,000 tents and 72,000 plastic sheets to 134,000 families. Many thousands more makeshift shelters were expected to arrive in coming days and weeks.
But Pakistan's National Disaster Management Authority said the number of homes destroyed or damaged had risen from 720,000 to at least 891,000 – rendering 488,000 additional families homeless.
"The greatest current need is in Punjab, where 484,000 families are still waiting for shelter aid, and in Sindh where 176,000 homeless families have not yet received tents or plastic sheets to shield them from the ongoing rain and occasional blazing sun," ESC information manager Wan Sophonpanich said yesterday.
In the country's northwest – among the first and worst-hit areas – provincial Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain warned that a famine was looming unless farmers received immediate help to plant new crops.
"The farmers have lost everything – their crops, their machines, their houses, their seeds," he said. Economists have estimated it will take at least two years for the agricultural sector to recover.
The International Committee of the Red Cross was also forced to issue a public safety warning this week after three children and a woman in Dera Ismail Khan and Tank – two northwest towns bordering militant tribal areas – were injured by floating IEDs that appeared to have been dislodged by floodwaters.
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