300,000 flee Pakistani city after levee breach

Deluge bears down as UN warns of worsening flood crisis, which has affected a fifth of the country and 17 million people.

Pakistani flood survivors take refuge in a graveyard after fleeing from their villages in Thatta near Hyderabad, Pakistan.

THATTA, PAKISTAN // Pakistan ordered 300,000 people to evacuate a southern city after waters breached its defences as the United Nations warned yesterday the country's worst 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.

The floods have swept south and the UN estimated that around one million people had been displaced in the province of Sindh in the last 48 hours where rising waters threatened a string of major towns. "We ordered people of Thatta city on Thursday night to move to safer places after floods breached an embankment at Faqir Jogoth village," Manzoor Sheikh, an administration official, said. About 70 per cent of Thatta's approximately 300,000 people had so far moved to safer areas and the deluge was bearing down on the city, he said. "We hope that [army] engineers will be able to repair the breach or otherwise floodwaters will inundate Thatta city."

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 six-metre wide breach. In Makli, which is a hilly area, devastated people were seen sitting out in the open with their children and cattle.

"It is the worst tragedy. We are leaving our homes in miserable condition," said Abdul Karim Palejo, a government school teacher in Thatta. "I leave behind a house which is more than a century old ... My heart bleeds when I think of this house inundating in floodwaters." A spokesman for the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Islamabad estimated that one million people were displaced in the last 48 hours in the southern province of Sindh alone.

"An already colossal disaster is getting worse and requiring an even more colossal response. The magnitude of this crisis is reaching levels that are even beyond our initial fears," spokesman Maurizio Giuliano said. "The number of those affected and those in need of assistance from us are bound to keep rising." But the orders to evacuate Thatta threw into chaos plans by hundreds of people already on the move, fleeing flooded villages and hoping that the district's biggest city could provide relief and shelter.

Pakistan's worst humanitarian disaster has left eight million dependent on aid for their survival and washed away huge swathes of the rich farmland on which the country's struggling economy depends. The Pakistani government has confirmed 1,600 people dead and 2,366 injured, but officials warn that millions are at risk from disease and food shortages. The country's disaster agency said yesterday there would be a "significant rise" in the death toll as waters recede and the numbers of missing are counted.

* Agence France-Presse