More rains expected in KP today as floods claim 292 lives

PESHAWAR: As many as 292 people have died and 351 others sustained injuries during monsoon rain spell that have caused floods in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, ARY NEWS reported.

The statistics have been shared by Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) in a report which also highlighted that 88,390 homes have been damaged during floods in KP.

“Those died during the floods included 141 men, 41 women and 110 children,” it said, adding that 20,474 livestock also died during the devastation.

The PDMA report shared that Dera Ismail Khan remained most affected from the floods. “433 structures are also damaged in the province,” it said.

Moreover, the Met Office has forecast more rains in the province from Saturday (today) which could result in flooding in nullahs. “There are also chances of land sliding from the heavy rainfall,” it said.

It is pertinent to mention here that more than 33 million people in Pakistan have been affected by the flooding, brought on by record monsoon rains amplified by climate change.

The UN’s World Health Organization said more than 1,460 health centres had been damaged, of which 432 were fully wrecked, the majority of them in the southeastern province of Sindh.

More than 4,500 medical camps have been set up by the WHO and its partners, while more than 230,000 rapid tests for acute watery diarrhoea, malaria, dengue, hepatitis and chikungunya have been distributed.

Such diseases are already circulating in Pakistan, alongside Covid-19, HIV and polio, and “now all these are at risk of getting worse”, WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told reporters in Geneva.