HYDERABAD, 27 September 2007 (IRIN) - Rukhsana Naz, an irate housewife in Hyderabad's badly flooded city centre Railway Colony, stood in knee-deep water inside her home and sloshed one foot around to show how dirty the water was. "It's been like this since it rained in mid-August. There's water everywhere, inside our homes, and we have no choice but to live with it," she said.

Hyderabad, the second largest city in the southern province of Sindh, was inundated about a month ago after heavy rains, and some parts of the city remain flooded.

"This has made our lives miserable. We residents have complained to the authorities, but they have told us that the drainage system needs to be overhauled and that it will take time. What are we supposed to do? Our children are falling sick and it's a daily crisis for us now," Akram Siddiqui, a pharmaceutical company executive who lives in the area, told IRIN.

Across the picturesque city what at first sight appear to be huge lakes separating the main thoroughfares reveal themselves on closer inspection to be empty plots of land filled with water that now has a greenish tinge to it. Swarms of mosquitoes hover overhead, and an all-pervasive stench permeates the air.

Cholera fear

"I've already treated patients for diarrhoea, skin, ear and eye infections. But my worry is that cholera might become a bigger problem - these conditions are tailor-made for such a disease to take root. Plus, we already have problems with the water supply in this city," Zulfiqar Ali, who runs a clinic in Qasimabad, another badly flooded area, told IRIN.

Hyderabad's water-supply has been a source of concern since 2004 when over 40 people, most of them children, died and hundreds more fell seriously ill with water-borne diseases because one of the city's two water filtration plants broke down.

Since early August 2007, when at least five people died in Hyderabad because of the floods, the water, which has welled up in parks, neighbourhoods and empty plots across the city, has refused to recede.

"We have been told to pump the water out of this neighbourhood. But it refuses to finish - this is our fifth round and the water here is still up to our knees," Mohammed Akbar, a municipal worker operating a suction pump on a water disposal truck, told IRIN in Qasimabad.

Flood forecasting

Qamar-uz-Zaman, the Pakistan Meteorological Office head, told IRIN that this year's floods were primarily the work of Cyclone Yemyin: "Even though we were able to predict the cyclone's expected landfall four days in advance, the sheer force it carried and the heavy tropical rains that resulted and the scale of the damage it caused couldn't be predicted," Zaman said.

"Tropical cyclones are rare in Balochistan and it affected the coastal highways and rural regions badly because it brought so much extra water on to the land," he added.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB), in a post-flood assessment report released in August, has stressed the need for an early warning system to avoid future disasters.

Zaman pointed out that although an early warning system was in place in flood-prone areas, it was limited to forecasting floods in rivers. "It does not cover catchment areas or mountainous regions. Our early warning system focuses on the Indus river basin only," he said.

However, the authorities were trying to develop a more effective system, the meteorological office chief said. "They are trying to develop a new system to cover all the flood-prone areas. But it will take time to develop something so elaborate," he said.

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