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 facto border that
divides the Himalayan region, more than 2,000 villages and the city
of Srinagar were submerged.
"The damage is shocking, people have been stranded on rooftops of
their homes for the last three days in some parts of Kashmir," a
senior official of National Disaster Response Force said in New
Delhi.
The official, who requested anonymity, said he would have deployed
disaster response teams in Kashmir before the floods if his office
had been given accurate weather predictions.
"We were all caught off guard because there was not a single warning
issued by the weather office. The flash floods took us by surprise,"
he said.
India's metrological department forecast heavy rains in Kashmir last
week, but the Central Water Commission, which issues flood
advisories, has been criticized by Indian media for not warning the
state.
A massive rescue operation led by the military was under way in both
countries
Some 22,000 people have been evacuated from their homes in India,
where 217 have so far been reported dead.
The flooding is the first major humanitarian emergency under new
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who called it a "national
disaster". It comes at a difficult time for Pakistani Prime Minister
Nawaz Sharif, who has faced weeks of street protests aimed at
forcing his resignation.
Soldiers rescued families using boats and airlifting them from
rooftops by helicopter after the river Jhelum breached embankments
in Srinagar, but many more remained stranded.
India has hundreds of thousands of soldiers stationed in Kashmir,
manning the border and conducting counter-insurgency operations
against separatist militants in a decades-old conflict that claimed
thousands of lives at its peak but has cooled off in recent years.
"Fortunately it is not raining in Kashmir today and we are now
getting a chance to send our teams across the region to help tens of
thousands of people who have been displaced," Indian defense
ministry spokesman Sitanshu Kar said.
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In Pakistan, 203 people were reported killed by the flash floods in
Kashmir and other northern areas of the country.
Saeed Qureshi, an official at the State Disaster Management
Authority (SDMA), said the volume of rainfall had rendered
contingency plans useless.
"Nobody can fight with nature," said Qureshi. "We had made a
contingency plan, identifying vulnerable populations along the banks
of rivers and torrents, but rains with unexpected density wreaked
havoc on the hilly areas beyond our imaginations."
Qureshi said so far 64 deaths had been reported, 29 of them from the
Haveli district that straddles the Line of Control (LoC) separating
disputed Kashmir between India and Pakistan.
"The amount of rainfall in a day was a staggering 400 millimeters in
Haveli which had no parallel in the past 50 years," he said, adding
that his organization was badly in need of more resources.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
said this year's monsoon rains have killed more than 1,000 people in
India alone.
When flash floods two years ago in the Himalayan Indian state of
Uttarakhand killed 5,000 people, including many Hindu pilgrims,
disaster relief authorities were again criticized for their slow
response.
(Additonal reporting by Rupam Jain Nair in NEW DELHI; Editing by
Frank Jack Daniel)
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