Pakistan flood update

The Pakistan flood crisis drags slowly on, and probably has at least a month to go before the waters fully recede.  Although the news coverage of the event is now little more than a drumbeat in the background, huge numbers of people are still being affected for the first time by this event.  The current crisis is focused on Mancchar Lake, which has been the destination of the waters that have travelled down the "ghost" parallel water course to the west of the main Indus channel, as shown very clearly by this NASA image:

The key iprblem at Manchhar has been that the waterways that allow the lake to drain are inadequate for the task, which has allowed the lake level to rise, causing new flood damage.  The reasons for this are clear from the following Google Earth image, taken before the flood:

In recent years the lake has suffered from inadequate inflows and serious salinity problems, to the extent that last year water was diverted into the lake from the Indus to improve water quality.  This of course shows that the need to have adequate drainage to allow large inflows to be released has not been a pressing issue of late. Thus, the two channels lining the lake to the Indus are too small to deal with the inflow:

In order to drain the excess water in the lake, the levees have been breached in eight places (I am unsure whether these breaches are natural or artificial), but the water level is reportedly still rising, and according to the UN 100,000 people have been displaced in 215 villages.   

Meanwhile the World Food Program have produced a report, available online here, that documents the scale of the impacts of the floods to date.  There are a number of useful aspects of this report, not least the following map that shows the extent of the floods:

Note that the data notes that there is no data for the northern regions, which of course were also very badly affected.  The upshot is that the statistics in the report under-represent the true impacts.  Nonetheless the statistics are eye-watering:

• 14.1 million people directly affected
• 392,786 damaged houses.
• 728,192 destroyed houses
• 7,600 destroyed schools
• 436 health facilities damaged or destroyed
• Overall production loss of sugar cane, paddy and cotton is estimated to be 13.3 million tonnes
• 2 million hectares of standing crops were either lost or damaged.
• 1.2 million head of livestock (excluding poultry) lost
• 14 million livestock are at risk due to fodder shortages and heightened risk of disease.

Of course it is important to consider these impacts in the context of the pre-existing situation in Pakistan.  This map, also from the WFP report, shows the state of food security in most of Pakistan before the floods.  Much of northern and western Pakistan were considered to be extremely food insecure. The central swathe of Pakistan most seriously affected by the floods was in a better (though in most cases not ideal) food security state:

The effect of these flood will be to plunge a large part of Pakistan into a state of extreme food insecurity through the coming winter, at a time when houses, infrastructure and health facilities are seriously compromised.