Floods, wildfires cause havoc

Many people were killed after heavy rain triggered flash floods in and around Leh, the main town in Indian Kashmir’s high-altitude Ladakh region, police said yesterday.

Also, massive flooding in Pakistan has threatened electricity generation plants, forcing units to shut down in a country suffering from a crippling energy crisis, officials said.

“Flood water reached to the boundary wall of the 1,200-megawatt Kot Addu Power Company plant late on Thursday,” the director general of the state-owned Pakistan Electric Power Co., Mohammad Khalid, said.

“Now only three units out of 12 are working and producing only 300 megawatts of electricity,” Mr Khalid said. But the water was receding, he said.

Mr Khalid said that in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakh­tunkhwa, three grid stations in Dera Ismail Khan, Swat and Shangla were shut down by the floods.

Two private power plants producing 350 megawatts each also closed as floodwater entered the courtyard of one plant, he said.

Meanwhile, the spread of the worst wildfires on record forced Russia yesterday to move missiles, evacuate children from camps and closely monitor radiation levels as Moscow choked under a lung-bursting smog.

The defence ministry overnight ordered the evacuation of missiles from a depot outside Moscow as the authorities warned of the risk of fires reactivating contamination in an area hit by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe.

Moscow commuters, many wearing sanitary masks, wheezed as they made their way to work in the worst smog to hit the capital since the fires broke out over one week ago. Experts said the pollution was well above safe levels.

The emergencies ministry said the total area ablaze was down slightly at 179,600 hectares , but there were still 588 fires across the affected region in European Russia and 248 new fires had appeared over the last 24 hours.

In China, shipping and tourist boat traffic on the Yalu River, which forms the border with North Korea, was suspended over fears of flooding as authorities predict more rain over the weekend, state media said.

The waterway in China’s northeast has seen more rain over the past two weeks than at any comparable time in recorded history, swelling it to critical levels and prompting the evacuation of thousands, the state Xinhua news agency said.

The situation has triggered fears of mass flooding in North Korea, whose official media has already reported widespread damage from inundations with more than 5,000 houses and 360 public buildings and factories destroyed.