Pakistan is racing to keep flooding away from power facility that serves millions

Authorities in Pakistan are scrambling to preserve a vital power station that supplies electricity to millions of people from flooding, authorities said on Monday, constructing a barrier in front of it.

 

Floods caused by historic monsoon rains and glacier melt in the mountainous north have affected 33 million people and killed almost 1,400 people, destroying houses, roads, railways, animals, and crops and costing $30 billion in damages.

 

1. The government and the U.N. Climate change, according to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, is to blame for the catastrophic weather that caused the flooding that drowned about a third of the country’s 220 million people.

 

The energy facility in the district of Dadu in the southern province of Sindh, one of the worst impacted locations in the country, provides power to six provincial districts.

 

A visit to the site on Sunday revealed that troops were busily fortifying a dike created in front of the station.

 

‘All preventative steps have already been done to save the grid in case of flooding,’ a top district official, Syed Murtaza Ali Shah, told Reuters on Monday.

 

The remark came after orders from Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, as reported by state broadcaster Radio Pakistan, to keep the 500kV power station from flooding.

 

U.N. After receiving 391 mm (15.4 inches) of rain in July and August, or over 190% more than the 30-year average, authorities have began work to analyse the South Asian nation’s rehabilitation needs.