Översvämmad flod i pakistan 2010
The floods in Pakistan are now worse than Haiti's January earthquake, the Indian Ocean tsunami, and the Kashmir earthquake combined, the United Nations' Office for the. A ClimateWire investigation into the origins of the flood disaster uncovered evidence that points to a calamity caused by man, the cumulative effect of erratic weather forecast by climate change models, massive deforestation, and lax attention to infrastructure.
Part 1 of 4. Her husband was out of town for work. The year-old mother was left with her five children and sister-in-law to settle in for the night. Then the incessant rain began to swamp this city in northwestern Pakistan, about 50 miles from the Afghan border. It didn't take long for the water spilling over the doorways to send her family on a desperate bid for survival. She and her children made it to higher ground, but not before losing her home and her brother-in-law, who hasn't been seen since.
It is something I have never seen in my life," recalled her neighbor Zunaira, 34, who was pushed out of nearby Risalpur village by the floods. Both women saw scores of buildings, men, women and children swept away by the floods. Though the government puts the death toll for the entire province at about 1,, almost everyone here believes the actual number of dead is far higher. These communities found themselves at the epicenter of an unusual weather pattern that dumped record rainfall on northwestern Pakistan and sent floodwaters surging from the north to the rest of the nation.
Residents describing the deluge say it began with a constant, pounding rain that started around July 28 and continued for a week. There were brief pauses of stifling heat and humidity, quickly followed by more rain. It went on that way for over a month. The center of Nowshera was flooded in some places up to 10 feet above street level. Given such accounts, it's easy to see why Zunaira, Bibi and many other Pakistanis attribute their nation's worst-ever natural disaster to God's wrath.
Effects of the Pakistan Floods, Worst Natural Disaster in Years
The government attributes the disaster to global warming, but there's more to the story. A ClimateWire investigation into the origins of the flood disaster uncovered evidence that points to a calamity caused by man, the cumulative effect of erratic weather forecast by climate change models, massive deforestation, and lax attention to infrastructure maintenance and engineering standards. The story of the flooding in Pakistan is a warning to other vulnerable nations that experts believe will bear the brunt of the gradual shifts in climate and weather patterns expected over the coming decades.
But it's also a sign of how much of the developing world is willfully making itself more vulnerable to climate change, even as poor nations ask rich ones to spend hundreds of billions per year on helping them to adapt. If the industrialized world is to blame for pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, Pakistanis are also at fault for eroding their country's ability to cope with the consequences. Final cries of the unrecorded dead Shehryar Shah, station manager at His news and talk station was virtually alone in covering the onset of the flooding as national media attention was fixated on a crash that same day of an Airblue passenger plane in the Margalla Hills, just north of Islamabad.
One of his most painful memories involves a caller indicating that there were about people stuck on rooftops in one part of town waiting for help, calling again and again when no one came. Their cell phone was off," Shah said, distraught. He described rushing floodwaters up to 20 feet deep in some places. The storm grounded army rescue helicopters for at least two days. The last time his town was hit by such devastation was in , but even then, the extent of flooding was much lighter, nothing like that seen this summer, he insists.
What Shah and the citizens of Nowshera and Charsadda witnessed in those days was a perfect storm event never before seen in Pakistan's history. Government officials say that from July 28 to Aug. The province normally averages slightly above 3 feet for an entire year. The northern section of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa usually sees scattered rains during the monsoon season, but never the deluge it had this year. The inundation even spread as far north as Gilgit and Skardu in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, a mountainous region that had never seen the monsoons.
Development Programme who is now leading flood recovery efforts in Gilgit. Monsoons shift away from normal watersheds Pakistan's monsoon rains normally emanate from moisture swept in over India from the Bay of Bengal.
Pakistan floods: Maps and graphics
In typical years, the rains open up in the east, centered on Punjab province, roughly near the cities of Lahore and Faisalabad. Experts say the rains then migrate northwest, dissipating by the time they reach the capital, Islamabad, and ending in scattered rains before dying out in Afghanistan. Isolated flooding incidents occur every year, but Punjab is normally capable of absorbing the monsoon rains. The densely populated province is home to four major rivers that eventually drain into the Indus River, the nation's largest.
Punjab is also home to an intricate network of irrigation and water management systems designed for crop use, energy production and flood control. But for the past few decades, PMD officials have noticed that the center of Pakistan's monsoon has been gradually shifting to the northwest, away from the nation's watershed in Punjab. Whereas flat Punjab is home to long, winding river systems capable of absorbing enormous quantities of water, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Federally Administered Tribal Areas on the Afghan border generate relatively shorter and narrow rivers cascading from the mountains that cover roughly half the region.
Its main focus has changed from the eastern parts to the western parts.