IOM Races to Deliver UK, US Shelter Aid to Pakistan's Flood Victims
IOM today completed a distribution of 500 tents donated by the UK
Department for International Development (DFID) and airlifted into
Islamabad's Chaklala Airbase by the Royal Airforce on Saturday
night.
IOM trucks driving through heavy rain on flood-damaged roads
delivered the first of the tents to destitute families in Gubella
village in Charsadda district within 12 hours of their arrival in
Pakistan.
Half the tents were trucked to Charsadda, the other half to
equally hard-hit Nowshera district, together with 500 buckets and
kitchen sets donated by IOM.
IOM expects to take delivery of and distribute another 1,000
tents and 4,100 shelter kits donated by DFID today. Later this week
IOM will take delivery of a further 24,000 buckets and 48,600
blankets donated by the UK Department for International Development
(DFID).
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Today IOM's Islamabad logistics cell will also receive a
consignment of 14,000 blankets and 1,153 (24 x 100 ft) rolls
of plastic sheet from the US Agency for International Development's
Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA). Plastic sheet has
been identified by shelter experts as the most urgently needed
shelter item requested from foreign donors.
All the items will be distributed to flood victims by IOM and
its partners. IOM teams work with village elders before any aid
distribution to identify the families most in need. They then
provide the families with tokens that can be exchanged for tents
and other relief items when the distribution takes place.
"The community knows who is most vulnerable and who most needs
the aid. The token system also ensures crowd control and minimizes
the risk of looting by people who are desperate," says IOM Pakistan
Emergency Officer Izora Mutya Maskun.
In Gubella, where a local leader offered his "hujra" or walled
compound for the distribution, villagers stood patiently in the
rain waiting to exchange their tokens for tents. Men carried the
heavy tents on their shoulders, while women and children carried
the buckets and kitchen sets through the mud to camp sites on
higher ground.
Charsadda, which lies at a confluence of five rivers flowing
into the Indus valley from the mountains of Kashmir and
Afghanistan, has already sustained terrible damage from the floods,
but with no sign of the rain abating, is bracing itself for further
destruction of property and livelihoods.
Jan Akbar Khan, whose home in the town of Charsadda survived,
but was flooded with over two metres of water on July 29th, says
that people feel helpless in the face of the floods, which he says
are unprecedented in the district in his lifetime. "It is not like
an earthquake. You can see it coming, but there is nothing that you
can do about it," he observes.
As the rivers have burst their banks, vast expanses of water
have engulfed Charsadda's villages and lush farmland. Villagers
whose houses were constructed of mud bricks and thatch saw their
homes dissolve. Hundreds of acres of peach and pear orchards and
sugar cane fields now lie under a metre of water.
With each rainfall, new torrents of brown water pour in,
destroying roads, bridges and buildings. Sections of the six-lane
highway linking the capital Islamabad with Peshawar, capital of
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province, completed in 2007, are crumbling
as the flood waters erode its foundations and bridges.
At the points where it crosses the vast expanses of the Indus
and Kabul rivers, it seems to float on a sea of rising mist and
rain. Displaced villagers camp on the central reservation,
tethering their animals to the crash barriers, while their children
play on the road.
Pakistan's worst floods on record are now affecting an estimated
13.8 million people as the flood waters flow south from KPK to the
country's heartland Punjab and Sindh provinces.
The Emergency Shelter Cluster of aid agencies working with the
government to deliver emergency shelter and other non-food relief
items to the displaced say that they expect the number of displaced
families to rise from an estimated 250,000 to 300,000.
The cost of providing them with tents, shelter kits using
plastic or tin sheet, and other non-food relief items such as
buckets, jerry cans, kitchen sets and blankets could reach USD 105
million, according to the group, which comprises 41 local and
international agencies, including the UN and the IFRC/PRCS, and is
coordinated by IOM.
For more information on IOM's activities in Pakistan and flood
relief pictures, please go to:
"paragraph-link-no-underline" href="/jahia/Jahia/pakistan" target=
"_blank" title="">http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/pakistan. For
more information on the work of the Emergency Shelter Cluster
please go to:
"https://sites.google.com/site/shelterpak2010/" target="_blank"
title="">https://sites.google.com/site/shelterpak2010/.
For additional information please contact:
Chris Lom
IOM Islamabad
Tel. +92.3085204684
E-mail:
"mailto:clom@iom.int">clom@iom.int
Or
Saleem Rehmat
Tel. +92.3008560341
E-mail:
"mailto:srehmat@iom.int">srehmat@iom.int