A HEATWAVE has killed more than 180 people in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province in just three days, officials said yesterday, leading authorities to declare an emergency as the electricity grid crashed and bodies stacked up in the morgues.
The outages hit large portions of Pakistan’s financial heart of Karachi and home to 20 million people, where residents lit bonfires in protest.
Unclaimed bodies were being rapidly buried to create space in the morgues, Anwar Kazmi, a senior official of the charitable Edhi Foundation, told reporters.
“We are urging people to bury their dead at the earliest in view of the current heatwave and poor power situation,” he said. “We have not run out of capacity at the morgue, but buried 30 unclaimed bodies this morning to create more space.”
At least 180 people had died of heat-related problems since Friday night, said Sabir Memon, Sindh province’s additional secretary for health.
Leave for all medical staff had been cancelled and authorities were distributing extra drips and rehydration salts to hospitals, he said. Casualties were still being tallied.
“Hundreds of patients suffering from the heat wave are being treated at government hospitals,” Saeed Mangnejo, the provincial health secretary, said.
Temperatures soared to 44C on Saturday and hovered at 43C on Sunday, coinciding with a surge of demand for power as families observed Ramadan, when Muslims fast during daylight hours.
Both the federal government and K-Electric, the private company that supplies Karachi with power, had promised there would be no outages during the time when families gathered to break their fast at sunset.
But power cuts left many families without water, air-conditioning, fans and light.
Officials from K-Electric said the heatwave had triggered unprecedented demand.
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