Iran is currently facing many natural disasters due to the Iranian regime’s destruction of the country’s natural environment. One such disaster is major floods. Last Friday, as the seasonal rain soaked the regions around the counties of Estehban and Darab in the Fars province, a terrible flood formed.
That day, many people had traveled to the countryside to enjoy their weekend near the Rudbal river, which later turned into a nightmare. No one expected such a flood would occur while the sky had been clear for most of the day and, as usual, none of the regime’s organizations gave warnings of the dramatic change in weather.
Reports stated that at least 31 people, including three children, lost their lives in the flood. If there hadn’t been sacrifices made by the people living and working in the region, the number of deaths would have likely exceeded those published by the regime’s media.
Despite the regime’s officials evading any responsibility and attributing the cause of the floods to unpredictable events, meteorological data indicates that summer rainfall in southern Iran has the potential to cause monsoon floods.
Flooding of the Sarbaz river and other rivers of Baluchistan during the summer months is not an unfamiliar phenomenon. Due to the changes in the weather, the regime should be prepared to anticipate such a situation and think of necessary measures to put in place to protect Iran’s citizens.
This issue requires the repair and reconstruction of infrastructures or the creation of new infrastructures. Forecasting and warning systems should be improved and increased, and people should be trained for such critical events.
The catastrophic flood of Shiraz in March 2020 showed that the infrastructure of the country had been destroyed in astronomical dimensions due to the regime’s policies. However, the regime did not take any new measures to solve the problems because the budget for renewing the infrastructures was relocated to the regime’s nuclear, missile, and malign regional activities.
Developed countries generally invest 10 to 20 percent of the generated wealth in the field of safety and risk reduction, as well as public health. In Iran, this has never been and is unlikely ever to be the case while the country is under the rule of the tyrannical regime.
For example, 60 years ago, a sea storm occurred off the coast of the Netherlands and spread inland, killing at least 2 thousand people. Following that incident, the Dutch government spent 20% of the country’s gross national product (GNP) on the huge Delta project to protect the country and its citizens from sea storms.
Around the same time, there was a typhoon in Japan that killed 5,500 people, and after that, a series of laws were passed that greatly helped to reduce human casualties in natural disasters. As a result, compared to the last 40 years, the ratio of the number of casualties in Japan to the population has greatly decreased from such disasters.
35 years after the terrible floods of Golab Dareh and Darband in 1987, which led to the death of more than 300 people, the flood forecasting and warning system of these two basins has still not been launched in the most important parts of the capital. In the event of a flood like in 1987, and if water enters the Tajrish metro, a great disaster with a huge number of casualties is likely to occur.
In many cases across the country, the construction budget of Raisi’s government has been basically eliminated or considered to be at a minimum. Along with Fars province, the provinces of Kerman, Hormozgan and Sistan, and Baluchistan are also exposed to potential floods.
Kamran Emami, one of the regime’s experts and the head of the comparative flood management working group in the ICID Commission, spoke about the Estehban flood, saying, “Unfortunately, in Iran, flood management discussions and methods of reducing casualties and damages are not addressed very seriously, and with every flood, several lives are taken, and the public’s attention is attracted for a while, and then everything is forgotten until the next flood. One of the reasons for this neglect is that we have become a short-term society.”
The only thing that Raisi’s government has improved is the number of executions and their guidance patrols to repress the country’s women in the hope they will divert the minds of the people from the country’s environmental and economic crises. Not long after the flood rampaged Estehban, the regime executed Iman Sabzekar, a construction worker, in public, along with a further ten inmates in the Sistan and Baluchestan province.
