Killer weather in Pakistan: 300 dead and 700 villages swept away

It is catastrophe in Pakistan! Incessant monsoon rains have devastated dams, riverbeds and caused heavy flooding in the vast areas of Punjab and Pakistan. The death toll has already reached 300 this morning, and at the moment, according to Geo Tv, 700 villages have been reported swept away by the high monsoon waves. Due to severe damages to infrastructure, livestock and farming. The national government, which is facing heavy protests from opposition groups who are accusing it of failing to launch an effective campaign of prevention, has announced a state of emergency.

The heavy rains which have been falling non-stop in the area over the past five days, are now devasting the districts of Punjab, Hafizabad, Sialkot and Gujranwala, where hundreds and thousands of hectares of farmland have been overflooded. To make matters worse, some of the river dams over the Chaneab River in India have collapsed. Three hundred villages in Hafizabad district and Chinot areas are completely under a bed of river-debris: the local population is petrified to death, while hundreds of people have been trapped on the rooves of their homes. But the emergency alert was launched only in four districts viz. Sialkot, Jhelum, Nankana Sahib, Narowal. Here, the heavy rainfalls have destroyed thousands of homes making it the most difficult area to bring relief aid along with the other villages that lie between the mountains of the beautiful Valley of Neelum.

The government has deployed ships and helicopters in the regions affected by the flooding, but reaching the tens and thousands of people trapped in their homes buried under landslides is proving to be increasingly arduous due to the intense flow of the river, in towns like Srinagar, the Indian Kashmir capital, where it continues to flow more violently than ever, even though the monsoon rains have ceased to fall in the past few hours.