flooding Archives - Iran News Daily

Flash Floods in Kabul Kill at Least 30 People

reporter 1222 — Wed, 26 Aug 2020 06:52:28 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – At least 30 people have been killed and hundreds of houses destroyed as flash floods caused by torrential rains lashed a city north of the Afghan capital Kabul, officials said on Wednesday .

Many children were among the dead in the city of Charikar, which was hit by heavy rains overnight, the ministry of disaster management said in a statement, AFP reported.

About 20 people were also injured and more than 300 houses destroyed.

A local government hospital in the province of Parwan said it had received the bodies of 17 people killed in the floods.

A relief operation was under way to help those affected.

Torrential downpours and flash floods kill scores of people annually in Afghanistan.

Many poorly built homes, mostly in rural areas, are at risk of collapse during the rains in the impoverished country.

Earlier this month, 16 people, including 15 children, were killed and dozens of houses were destroyed when flash floods ravaged a village in the eastern province of Nangarhar.

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Floods Kill Dozens in South China

reporter 1222 — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 08:34:54 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – Floods and mudslides in south China have uprooted hundreds of thousands of people and left dozens dead or missing, state media reported Thursday.

The bad weather has wreaked havoc on popular tourist areas that had already been battered by months of travel restrictions during the coronavirus outbreak.

Torrential downpours unleashed floods and mudslides that caused nearly 230,000 people to be relocated and destroyed more than 1,300 houses in the south China, official state news agency Xinhua reported, citing the Ministry of Emergency Management.

In southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, six people were reported dead and one missing, Xinhua said.

Streets were waterlogged in popular tourist destination Yangshuo, forcing residents and visitors to evacuate on bamboo rafts.

The local government said more than 1,000 hotels had been flooded and more than 30 tourist sites damaged, AFP reported.

One owner of a family-run hotel told Xinhua that the guest rooms were submerged in one meter (three feet) of rainwater.

The extreme weather has dealt a hefty blow to the region’s tourism sector, which is still reeling from the COVID-19 epidemic.

The emergency management ministry said there were direct economic losses of over 4 billion yuan (more than $550 million) from the flooding, Xinhua reported.

In Hunan Province, at least 13 people were killed in rain-triggered disasters, and another eight people are missing or killed in southwestern Guizhou province, according to the local emergency response departments, Xinhua said.

The heavy downpours began at the beginning of June and have led to “dangerously high water levels” in 110 rivers, Xinhua reported.

Further rainstorms are expected in the next few days across the south.

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Lake Urmia water level rises by 35cm

reporter 1222 — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 10:51:25 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – The water level at Lake Urmia, northwestern Iran, currently stands at 1,271 meters above sea level, which is 35 centimeters more than the water level on the corresponding date last year.

Atabak Jafari, head of West Azarbaijan Regional Water Company said that despite the decrease in regional precipitation, the water level of the lake Urmia has registered an increase of 35 centimeters year-on-year.

“Precipitation level in this catchment area in the current Iranian calendar year [started March 20, 2020] has reached 316 millimeters, while the figure stood at 438 millimeters in the same period in the year before,” he said.

“Lake volume, however, has increased from its previous 3.58 billion cubic meters to its present 4.62 billion cubic meters, increasing 1.4 billion cubic meters annually,” Jafari added.

Shared between West Azarbaijan and East Azarbaijan provinces in northwestern Iran, Lake Urmia, was once the largest salt-water lake in the Middle East.

However, decades of long-standing drought spells and elevated hot summer temperatures that speed up evaporation as well as increased water demands in the agriculture sector shrank the lake drastically.

In 1999 the volume of water which was at 30 billion cubic meters drastically decreased to half a billion cubic meters in 2013. Moreover, the lake’s surface area of 5,000 square kilometers in 1997 shrunk to one-tenth of that to 500 square kilometers in 2013.

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