Fears Mount for Missing as Iran Flooding Death Toll Reaches 90

At least 95 people have been killed in floods that swept Iran over the past week, according to the country’s Forensic Medicine Organization.

Some 25 Iranian provinces have been affected by the heavy rains that led to severe flash-flooding, landslides and mudslides. Search and rescue teams from the Iranian Red Crescent are active in 661 separate locations.

Around 20,000 homes are reported to have been damaged or destroyed together with vital infrastructure and farmland.

For its part, the Red Crescent had counted 90 dead by Wednesday night. Spokesman Pirhossein Kolivand said another eight people were known to be missing.

There are fears that far more people will have died or been displaced than those included in the official statistics.

On Wednesday morning Minister of Interior Ahmad Vahidi visited Tehran’s Imamzadeh Dawood area, which was badly-hit by a deluge last Wednesday. In some parts of the site, he reported, the mud was still three to four meters deep a week later.

The newspaper Shargh reported of Imamzadeh Dawood on Thursday: “The smell is the smell of Metropol [a ten-storey building that collapsed in Abadan in May, where scores of people were buried under the rubble for days on end].

Some rural villages in Iran have been totally inundated, especially in the south and east of the country. The Meteorological Organization is warning that eight provinces could be affected by further monsoons and flooding in the next few days.