Cyclone 'Phet' leaves 15 dead, thousands homeless
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The fearful cyclone "Phet" turned into mere gusty wind pressure as it slipped into India's Rajasthan coastal desert area on Monday, after taking a toll of over 15 lives, injuring several dozens and leaving thousands homeless in the coastal belt of south Pakistan.
"The cyclone is over," said Director General of the Meteorological Department Qamaruz Zaman Chaudhry. "It is reduced to just a wind pressure."
"Now, fishermen can sail into sea to fetch fishes," said Chaudhry, declaring the coastal waters as completely safe for sailing while ruling out the possibility of further rains in southern Sindh province. However, he said the eastern Punjab province would get rains during the next 24 hours.
Heavy rains and winds lashed Karachi and other coastal cities on Sunday, killing at least 15 people, most of them electrocuted, and injuring several others as the cyclone swirled along the country's coastal line.
Life is paralyzed in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city of 15 million inhabitants, and in Hyderabad, the second largest urban center in Sindh province, and in the smaller cities such as Thatta and Keti Bandar along the coastal line of Pakistan in Sindh and southwest Balochistan province.
The coastal highway in Balochistan has been washed away, freezing the vehicular traffic while network in Sindh has also been eroded by heavy rains that unleashed as the "Phet" brim brushed Pakistan over the weekend.
In a country experiencing sever power crisis, life in urban centers turned miserable as most of the city areas are without light for the past 20 to 36 hours, local media reported. While 2 to 3 feet of stagnant water in the streets presents a river scene as the fragile drainage system was severely damaged. Medical experts fear it would generate epidemics.
Scores of boats sank in the natural deep sea port coast of the newly-built Gwadar in Balochistan. An early warning moored majority of the fishing boats in both the provinces that affected the livelihood of hundreds of families.
Over 100,000 villagers had been rescued to safety into relief camps in the two provinces whereas a battalion of Pakistani troops is carrying out rescue operation in Balochistan where intense rains over 300 millimeters washed away hundreds of homes. Some areas of Karachi received rains up to 128 mm while the rest of Sindh experienced 40-86 mm of downpour, according to Pakistani media.
Three battalions of military were called in Sunday that are busy in rescue operation in the worst affected coastal areas of Sindh that have been declared as the red zone from Thatta to Umerkot by the Sindh provincial government.
A Pakistani military C-130 aircraft and two helicopters are participating in the rescue and relief operations in Balochistan, said a spokesman of the army's Inter-Services Public Relations on Monday.
The fatal spinning of "Phet" generated in the Indian ocean a week ago and spooled into a category-4 cyclone, but reduced to category-2 before hitting Oman to take 16 lives on Saturday. It further reduced to category-1 as it slammed Balochistan. Further reducing down into a tropical storm status it brushed the port city of Karachi before crashing into Sindh's coastal areas on Sunday.
In 1992, a cyclone killed 450 people and displaced 200,000 people in Thatta, about 100 km east to Karachi. In 1999, some 700 people went missing and hundreds of coastal villages were submerged east of Karachi when a storm hit Pakistan. A tropical storm flooding destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes in Balochistan in June 2007.
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