Inter-Agency Real Time Evaluation of the Humanitarian ... - OCHANet

2 ‐ Context
Magnitude of the disaster:
IA RTE of the humanitarian response to Pakistan’s 2010 Floods crisis
1. Pakistan’s 2010 floods are considered amongst one of the major disasters of the 21 st
century due to the disaster’s widespread geographical scale and distribution (from the
Himalayan Plateau to the Arabian Sea), the unprecedented caseload of affected population
andits economic impact. In fact, it was the largest disaster ever recorded in terms of affected
area, affected people and households damaged. Comparatively, in total, a wider area and more
people have been affected by these floods than those affected by the Indian Ocean Tsunami
that swept across 14 countries in 2004, the Pakistan 2005 and the Haiti 2010 earthquakes
combined.
2. According to the Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), the 2010
floods constitute the country’s largest disaster 1 as some 20,202,327 persons, approximately 10%
of the country’s population, was affected, despite the scale of the disaster, casualties remained
relatively low at 1,985. However, the number of casualties was relatively low in comparison to
other recent disasters such as the 2005 Kashmir earthquake (casualty ratio 1:100). However, it
must be noted that the 2005 earthquake, while deadlier was more localized 2 .
3. The 2010 Pakistan floods began in late July, and following heavy monsoon rains that
lasted for more than eight weeks, they evolved from normal flash floods into a massive disaster
affecting large parts of the countryThe floodwater waves washed down from north to south as
the Indus River caudal extended to about forty times its usual size and at one point, submerged
a fifth of the country’s land mass. Initially, the provinces of Balochistan and Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) were flooded. In mid August, as flood waters flowed south and as Punjab
and Sindh provinces experienced resultant widespread flooding, entire populations residing on
both sides of the Indus River basin were affected. The floods directly and/or indirectly affected
78 of Pakistan’s 121 districts, devastating and submerging entire villages, roads, bridges, water
supply and sanitation infrastructure, agricultural lands, livestock as well as washing away houses
and health and education facilities.
1
IRIN PAKISTAN: Top 10 natural disasters since 1935. It is the fifth flood in Pakistan affecting 5 million or more in less
than 40 years.
2
Link to comparative graph: http://ndma.gov.pk/Documents/flood_2010/flood_comparison.pdf
Riccardo Polastro, Aatika Nagrah, Nicolai Steen and Farwa Zafar
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