A man walks through a flooded street in Srinagar yesterday. Emergency workers were battling to prevent waterborne diseases like cholera from spreading as fetid water swilled around the Kashmir Valley more than a week after the worst flooding in more than a century.
Agencies/Srinagar
Emergency workers battled yesterday to prevent waterborne diseases from spreading, as fetid water swilled around the Kashmir Valley more than a week after the state’s worst flooding in more than a century.
More than 75,000 people were still stuck in partly submerged homes in Kashmir’s main city of Srinagar, where roads have been transformed into stagnant canals strewn with sewage, wreckage and dead livestock.
“Floating carcasses have become a big source of worry with most houses still waterlogged. We are struggling to get in touch with government health officials,” said Abul Syed Rahman, who owns three hotels in Kashmir.
Both the Indian and Pakistani sides of the Himalayan region have seen extensive flooding this month with Srinagar particularly hard hit.
Flooding and landslides have killed hundreds of people and tens of thousands are homeless. The cost of damage in Kashmir may run into billions of dollars.
The federal government said it feared a rise in the number of people getting sick from dirty water and had delivered 25 water filtration plants with the capacity to filter 400,000 litres a day, and 13 tonnes of water purification tablets.
More than 200,000 people have been rescued in the past eight days and communication networks partially restored.
“Finally, we are seeing some government officials trying to restore basic services. In the last eight days we had no help from the government,” said Alam Wani, a Srinagar bank official.
Wani’s two-storey house has been partially submerged since the onset of torrential rain, forcing him to move into a mosque with his family of eight.
Hospitals were themselves hit by flooding when the swollen Jhelum river burst its banks, with staff scattered around the city and unable to get to work.
Doctors were running out of medicines and surgical equipment as they struggled to provide emergency services in makeshift medical centres.
“Our medical headquarters is totally under water. It is very difficult to deal with critical cases. Thousands of patients need antibiotics and diabetics require insulin,” Dr Hina Rahman said.
Doctors warned that getting waterlogged hospitals working again would be tough because basement store rooms were flooded and expensive equipment like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and X-ray machines ruined.
People have been coming in with respiratory infections and gastric problems, said Zubair Khwaja, a doctor who normally works at Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences but has been volunteering with the Muslim Students Board, a group that runs a religious school in Srinagar.
Municipal authorities said they had started collecting rubbish from pools of stagnant water and the fire department was using fire engines to pump out waterlogged areas.
The stench of rotting carcasses of cattle was almost unbearable for people in some parts of Srinagar, a city of more than a million people.
With acres of stagnant water remaining in the city, Khwaja warned that the risk of waterborne diseases would increase. “You can smell the air,” he said.
Meanwhile, government employees posted in the Kashmir Valley but stranded in the Jammu region, resented orders to join their duty immediately.
Crippled by the absence of its employees from their places of duty in the valley, the state government on Sunday ordered them to report to work immediately, failing which strong administrative action will be taken.
In order to again establish its completely shattered administrative apparatus, the state government ordered its employees to join duty so that relief and rescue work can be started in the flood-affected areas.
The state government on Sunday removed an inspector general of police from his place of posting. He was transferred to police headquarters.
“The top officials of the state government are not functioning from their offices but from the safer heights of Hari Niwas (palace). We were ordered to join duties, where do we do that? At the palace or inside the submerged offices?” a senior official of the state government said on condition of anonymity.
PM calls off birthday celebrations
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who turns 64 this week, has called off his birthday celebrations and instead appealed to people to help victims in flood-hit Jammu and Kashmir. In an appeal on his personal Twitter account late Sunday, Modi said friends and well-wishers were planning to celebrate his birthday tomorrow. “My humble request - do not celebrate my birthday. Instead, dedicate yourselves towards relief work in Jammu and Kashmir through your time and resources,” Modi said. “The need of the hour is to stand shoulder to shoulder with our sisters and brothers of Jammu and Kashmir,” he said.