Evacuations ordered in Pakistan

Evacuations ordered in Pakistan

As Pakistan's floods continue to sweep southward, the government has warned residents of three towns to evacuate after floodwaters breached an embankment.

Hadi Bakhsh Kalhoro, a senior official in the local Thatta district government, told the AFP news agency that floods had caused a breach in one of the embankments at the village of Surjani, close to the Indus river, threatening the rest of the area.
Around 400,000 people normally live in the threatened towns of Sujawal, Mirpur Bathoro and Daro in Pakistan's southern Sindh province, but most were thought to have fled already.
Farther north along the Indus, Pakistani authorities were also struggling to block rising floodwaters from overrunning the city of Shahdadkot, home to some 100,000 people, and to rescue thousands from at least 25 nearby villages.
But elsewhere in the Sindh province, floods had washed away at least 40 other villages, and the United Nations has estimated that 800,000 people throughout Pakistan remain so isolated by the floods that they can only be reached by air.
In areas near Hyderabad, Sindh's second-largest city, the Indus has swelled from its normal width of 200-300 meters to almost three and a half kilometers, an army spokesman said.
"Really the problem in the lower Sindh district is quite different than elsewhere, because it's flat," Al Jazeera's Zeina Khodr, reporting from Hyderabad, said.
The floods that have submerged large areas of Sindh are not expected to recede for months, Khodr said, and evacuees are not getting much food or aid.
PHOTO CAPTION
Pakistan army troopers unload relief packs at Dera Ghazi Khan in Punjab province, Pakistan on Thursday Aug. 26, 2010.
Agencies

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