Chandpur's Shahrasti upazila dogged by severe water crisis

CHANDPUR, Sept 18: Shahrasti upazila of the district is witnessing an overwhelming crisis of pure drinking water in the flood aftermath, which has brought in unbearable suffering for a large number of residents.
Local people are finding it very difficult to collect necessary potable water daily as a total of 1,600 deep tube-wells installed by government and a few thousand shallow tube-wells sunk by private initiatives have gone out of order for remaining under floodwater in the recent spell of flood.
Many roads and culverts and tube-wells are still submerged in floodwater in many places-it was obser-ved. Floodwater is receding slowly in the upazila, this correspondent found while visiting different areas including Chitosey Uttar, Chitosey West and Suc-hipara unions on Thursday last.
The prolonged flood has damaged innumerable tube-wells in all the 10 unions under Shahrasti upazila, the worst flood -affected area in the entire district.
Consequently, hundreds of people have been facing acute crisis of drinking water in the entire upazila.
According to the local Public Health Engineering Department (PHED) office, a total of 5,763 deep tube-wells have been installed in the upazila by the government. Of them, flood has damaged at least 1,600 tube-wells.
Moreover, a few thousand shallow tube-wells installed privately by local people in their homesteads have been also damaged due to the current flood that has submerged them.
Talking to the FE, Shahrasti PHED Assistant Engineer Mahbubul Alam said, in order to mitigate the crisis of pure drinking water, 15,000 water purification tablets have been distributed among people.
He added very soon, initiatives will be taken in collaboration with UNICEF to repair the out- of- order tube-wells .
Local people- Md Aktar Hossain of Bettoli village under Chitosey Uttar union and Shanto Hasan Mia of Koya village of Chitosey West Union- told the FE that most tube-wells (both the government and privately-installed ones) have gone under floodwaters and they have become inoperative causing acute crisis of pure drinking water.
Upazila Health and Family Planning Officer Dr Sarwar Hossain told the FE, "Medical teams are working in different flood shelters and at the same time the teams' doctors and health assistants are providing the flood victims with medicare services and making mass people aware of the water-borne diseases including arsenicosis."

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