Floods wreak havoc in North Korea

Posted on : 2012-08-15 11:49 KST Modified on : 2012-08-15 11:49 KST
Citizens suffering from acute shortages of food and medicine
 South Pyongan province. (AP)
South Pyongan province. (AP)

By Gil Yun-hyung, staff reporter

Ri Hyang-ran was forced to flee her home in her pajamas when heavy rains hit her village on the evening of July 23. The resident of the Ungok workers' district in Songchon County, South Pyongan province, was in such a rush to get out that the only thing she took with her was a portrait of Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung. A tearful Ri told an AP reporter who visited the scene on August 13 that she was forced to leave behind family pictures and medals her sons received while serving in the military.

Fear-stricken villagers took refuge in the mountains. Ri recalled being unable to see anything in the dark. "But I could hear the walls crumbling," she said. By daybreak, the home she lived in for twenty years had been washed away.

One hundred sixty-nine people lost their lives in the heavy rains that hit the Pyongan and Hwanghae provinces in late July, while tens of thousands more lost their homes. Songchon is located at the junction of the Taedong River and the Piryu River, one of its tributaries. Its position left it ill-prepared to withstand the hardest rains in decades. 
The North Korean Red Cross said twenty people lost their lives in the county's flooding, seven of them in the Ungok district alone. Five thousand Songchon residents were left homeless.

With just a month remaining before harvest season, the news service reported a catastrophic impact on corn and soybean fields that had already been severely damaged by drought conditions in May and June. In a June report, the United Nations said two-thirds of North Korea's population of 24 million was suffering a shortage of food, with serious famine conditions already under way in some regions.

Foreign news outlets worried that the flooding could leave the country facing another massive famine like the "Arduous March” in the 1990s. The UN World Food Programme began providing emergency food aid last week.

Residents who lost their homes have been depending on emergency relief supplies sent by the International Red Cross.

"The rain was coming down so hard, and my child was so scared," said mother Pak Un-su in the AP report as she recalled the terror of that night. “You have no idea how scared my child was. She was yelling ‘Mommy, run faster! The rain’s coming down hard!” Pak added as she clutched her five-year-old daughter.

Next to her on the navy blue blanket provided by the Red Cross, she had set up a temporary kitchen: a bag of potatoes, squash in a green plastic bowl, utensils washed and stored in a red container. Outside, a tin pot of cornmeal noodles sat on a makeshift campfire.

“My heart hurts when I think about how we‘re going to live without a home,” she said. “We have to hurry and rebuild.”

Ri Ung-ho, a former miner, was quoted as saying “All the men have left to help fix the roads. The only people left here are the aunties,” said former miner Ri Ung Ho, as he stood on the dirt patch where his house once stood. “I’m keeping watch over them.”

Songchon was home to 290,000 people, but the flooding left many of its villages deserted, the AP said. In an August 14 report, the UN Resident Coordinator's Office in Pyongyang said an increasing number of people were suffering from diarrhea and acute respiratory infections due to the lack of medicine at local hospitals.

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