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Abstract
This study was conducted to evaluate the main causes and damages of flood (2010) in district Charsadda. Most of the villages in Charsadda District are prone to floods during summer mainly because of torrential rainfall, melting of snow and ice, deforestation and over grazing in the catchment areas of rivers flowing across Charsadda. Overflowing the natural levees, the 2010 flood caused tremendous damages to houses, agriculture, standing crops and other infrastructures. The houses were damaged and resulted the displacement of 5500 families. All governmental and private health facilities and water supply schemes were damaged completely. Based on the study findings, it is recommended that flood relief channels and embankments should be improved along with the active flood areas to minimize the flood hazards.
Keywords: Rood hazards, agriculture, livestock, houses, infrastructure
Introduction
Roods are natural and recurrent events and become a big problem mainly because of human interference with a river for the use of flood plain or encroachment (White, 1974). Flood risk is defined by the probability of flooding and the damage caused by the flood event. There is a general belief that extreme flood events will occur more frequently due to changes in climate and land use (Reynard et al., 2001; Brown and Damery, 2002). Flood has many types including river flood, coastal flood and flash flood. However, flash flood is the cause of damages in the study area. A flash flood is a disaster that gives no warning. One place may be affected by a cloud burst, while another a few kilometers away may be untouched. This makes it impossible to predict when a river will burst its banks (Lockyer, 1996). Hash floods are a common disaster in Pakistan and often hit Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK). Hash floods are a direct result of tampering with nature in a cruel way. There are evidences of flash flood and its hazards in the past, such as on 1st July, 1977, about 229 mm of rain fall occurred in a single day in Karachi. This heavy rainfall caused flash flooding in Malir and Layari river courses, killing 280 people, rendering 18,000 homeless and destroying 5,000 dwellings, many of them washed away in the bed of Malir. Low lying areas of Karachi City were flooded...