KARACHI // An intense heatwave has killed more than 200 people over three days in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province, with authorities declaring an emergency as the power grid crashed and bodies stacked up in morgues.
The outages hit large portions of Pakistan’s financial heart of Karachi, home to 20 million people, where residents lit bonfires in protest.
Unclaimed bodies were being rapidly buried to create space in the morgues, said Anwar Kazmi, a senior official of the charitable Edhi Foundation.
“We are urging people to bury their dead at the earliest in view of the current heatwave and poor power situation,” he said.
“We have not run out of capacity at the morgue, but buried 30 unclaimed bodies this morning to create more space.”
The death toll in Karachi, the country’s largest city, where temperatures hit 45°C at the weekend, is at least 202 and another 11 deaths were reported in southern parts of central Punjab province.
Leave for all medical staff was cancelled and authorities were distributing extra drips and rehydration salts to hospitals, he said. Casualties were still being tallied.
“Hundreds of patients suffering from the heatwave are being treated at government hospitals,” said Saeed Mangnejo, the provincial health secretary.
The National Disaster Management Agency said the government had asked the army and paramilitary Rangers to help relief efforts, including setting up heatstroke treatment centres around Karachi.
Temperatures in Karachi soared to 44°C on Saturday and hovered at 43°C on Sunday, coinciding with a surge of demand for power as families observed Ramadan, which began on Friday in Pakistan.
Both the federal government and K-Electric, the private company that supplies Karachi with power, had promised there would be no outages during the time families gathered to break their fast at sunset.
But power cuts left many without water, air-conditioning, fans and light.
Officials from K-Electric said the heatwave had triggered unprecedented demand and that many faults were caused by illegal connections overloading power lines.
Teams trying to fix the faults had been attacked and employees badly beaten, a K-Electric spokesman said.
Corruption and mismanagement mean most of Pakistan usually suffers at least eight hours of daily power cuts. Those in poorer areas are hit even harder.
The cash-strapped government sells power for less than the cost of production, but its late payments to suppliers cause a chronic shortage.
Many wealthy or influential families and factory owners exacerbate the problem by refusing to pay their bills or cutting deals with corrupt power officials.
More hot and humid weather was predicted for another 24 hours, though thunderstorms forecast for later in the week could bring cooler weather.
Punjab province on Monday reported 11 heat-related deaths over the previous 48 hours.
The deaths in Pakistan come a month after neighbouring India suffered the second deadliest heatwave in its history, with more than 2,000 deaths, most in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
* Reuters with additional reporting from Agence France-Presse
