On Wednesday, a leading NGO claimed that at least 450 people have died in Pakistan’s largest city due to an intense heatwave. The Edhi Foundation stated that it had received a total of 427 bodies over the last four days excluding Wednesday while on Tuesday Sindh government released 23 bodies in three government hospitals.
Pakistan’s port city, Karachi, has been hit by extremely hot weather since Saturday with temperatures rising beyond 40 degrees Celsius for the third day running on Wednesday, which is quite high for coastal areas.
“We have four mortuaries operating in Karachi and we have reached a stage where there is no more space to keep more bodies in our mortuaries,” says Faisal Edhi who manages the Trust.
Edhi Trust is Pakistani biggest welfare organization offering various free or subsidized services to the poor, homeless, orphan street children, discarded babies and battered women.
“The bitter truth is that most of these bodies come from places where even amidst this kind of scorching weather there are long hours of load shedding,” he lamented.
Edhi said many of the dead were homeless people and drug addicts living on the streets. “These guys just spend their whole day outside hunting for fixes so imagine how bad things would be like because of such extreme heatwave,” he confessed before adding: “However only those government hospitals or wherever they were taken initially can tell you cause of death.”
Only on Tuesday itself they had received one hundred thirty five dead bodies at their morgues while yesterday another one hundred twenty eight were brought.
Furthermore Karachites also must endure prolonged periods of power outages in certain areas with KESC (Karachi Electric) now saying that it resorts to load-shedding because there are still outstanding dues worth Rs 10 billion owed by Sindh government.
Karachi which is also Pakistan’s financial capital as well as cosmopolitan city accommodates millions migrants from other parts of the country besides Afghanistan and some African countries and this includes hundreds of thousands of drug addicts living on the streets.
