800,000 in Pakistan reachable only by air

Islamabad: More rain threatened Pakistan on Wednesday as aid workers pleaded for more help and helicopters to reach hundreds of thousands of people isolated by record floods.

The Pakistan Meteorological Department forecast thundershowers and occasional heavy rain into Friday in the central Punjab Province, northern Kyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province and Kashmir.

On Tuesday, the United Nations said 800,000 people could be reached only by air, and called for 40 more helicopters from the international community to help ship aid to people isolated by the flooding.

"These unprecedented floods pose unprecedented logistical challenges, and this requires an extraordinary effort by the international community", John Holmes, the United Nation's Emergency Relief Coordinator, said in a prepared statement.

Reinforcing its call for more helicopters, the United Nations cited the destruction of access roads and bridges in Pakistan's north, particularly the Swat Valley in Kyber-Pakhtunkhwa, in the Gilgit-Baltistan region and the Pakistani-administered region of Kashmir. The flooding also has isolated people in the country's Punjab and Sindh provinces, according to World Food Program, a United Nations agency that specializes in food aid to areas affected by crises.

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Marcus Prior, a spokesman for the organization, said: "In northern areas that are cut off, markets are short of vital supplies, and prices are rising sharply. People are in need of food staples to survive. There is currently no other way to reach these flood victims, other than by helicopter."

Pakistani officials said the need for helicopters extended to the southwestern Baluchistan Province, where canal banks have given way, cutting road links. Thousands of families were left marooned in the Jaffarabad district of Baluchistan province, with no links to the rest of the country, the officials said.

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On Wednesday, Dawn newspaper quoted a Baluchistan government official, Nasibullah Bazai, as saying that people remained stranded in different areas of the Nasirabad division as efforts were under way to rescue them.

"But we need more helicopters and boats," Mr Bazai said.
Efforts to rescue people stranded in the nearby town of Gandakha also remained hamstrung due to the lack of boats and helicopters, officials said.

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Unusually heavy monsoon rains led to flooding that began in late July and has now affected 17 million people, according to United Nations estimates -- roughly one tenth of the population. An estimated 1,600 people have died, the United Nations said, and only one million of the estimated six million people in need have received emergency shelter.