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On Friday, the daily high
temperature was about 36 degree Celsius (97 Fahrenheit), according to Dr
Mohammad Hanif of the Director National Weather Forecasting Centre.
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Sea breezes brought lower temperatures on Friday to ease a
heat wave that killed more than 1,150 people around Pakistan's teeming port
city of Karachi during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.
Mass funerals were held
for 50 unidentified victims on Friday before their bodies were hastily buried. The extreme heat of up to
44 degrees Celsius (111 Fahrenheit) - the hottest since 1981 - coincided with
power failures and triggered sharp criticism of the government's response in
the city of 20 million people.
On Friday, the daily high
temperature was about 36 degree Celsius (97 Fahrenheit), according to Dr
Mohammad Hanif of the Director National Weather Forecasting Centre. The power outages left
many without fans, water or light at the beginning of Ramadan, when many
Muslims do not eat or drink during daylight hours. "By Friday, at least
1,150 people have died in the government-run hospitals," said Anwar Kazmi
of the Edhi Foundation, a private charity that runs a network of ambulances and
morgues.
Reuters report continues:
The stench of rotting
corpses pervaded one of those morgues on Friday as workers offered funeral
prayers for 50 victims.
Afterwards, workers
removed the bodies from a hallway so full it was hard to walk through and then
piled them into ambulances to be taken to a graveyard.
"We waited for three
days for any claimants to come forward, and now we are going to bury the 50
bodies," Edhi's Amanullah Khan told Reuters, adding that some of the
victims appeared to be homeless.
"Before we bury
them, we take photographs and issue tag numbers in case any claimants turn up
later and can identify the body."
The crisis - following a
heat wave in India last month that killed about 2,500 people - illustrates how
ill-prepared many developing nations are for the extreme weather conditions
that scientists say will accompany global climate change in coming decades.
"These type of
events are taking place across the world ... we need to prepare ourselves and
develop our strategy," said Qamar uz Zaman Chaudhry, the Islamabad-based
special adviser for Asia to the UN-World Meteorological Organization.
"It's time to learn
lessons, instead of getting into the blame game."
Pakistan's national and
local political parties have blamed one another for the crisis, while much of
the relief was provided by the powerful military and private charities such as
the Edhi Foundation.
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