Authorities ordered the evacuation of 300,000 people from Thatta after waters breached its defenses as the United Nations warned on Friday the country’s worst ever humanitarian crisis was deepening.
For nearly a month, torrential monsoon rain has triggered massive floods steadily moving from north to south, affecting a fifth of the volatile country — an area roughly the size of England — and 17 million people.
“We ordered people of Thatta city on Thursday night to move to safer places after floods breached an embankment at Faqir Jogoth village,” top administration official Manzoor Sheikh said.
At least 70 percent of Thatta’s population of approximately 300,000 people had so far moved to safer areas and the deluge is fast heading towards the city, he said.
“We hope that the (army) engineers will be able to repair the breach or otherwise floodwaters will inundate Thatta city,” Sheikh said.
He said the surrounding towns of Sujawal, Mirpur Bathoro and Darro — which had a combined population of 400,000 — had already been evacuated.
People were fleeing Thatta, where streets were deserted and shops shut, to nearby Makli and Karachi with their livestock and luggage as engineers tried to repair the 20-foot wide breach.
In Makli, which is a hilly area, devastated people were seen sitting out in the open with their children and cattle.
One UN spokesman estimated that in the last 48 hours in Sindh alone, one million people were displaced.
Flooding has washed away huge swathes of the rich farmland on which Pakistan’s struggling economy depends.
“We can say in Sindh, it is getting from bad to worse,” said Maurizio Giuliano, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Islamabad.
“We are delivering faster and faster but the floods seem determined to outrun our response.”
The United Nations has warned that 800,000 people in desperate need of aid had been cut off by the deluge across the country and appealed for more helicopters to deliver supplies to those people reachable only by air.
On the ground, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) says 4.5 million people remain in urgent need of shelter.
