TEHRAN — Flash floods in Iran’s drought-stricken southern Fars province have killed at least 21 people, national television said Saturday.
Heavy rains swelled the Roudbal river by the city of Estahban, according to the city’s governor Yousef Karegar.
Karegar said rescue teams had saved 55 people who were trapped by the flash flooding, but at least six people were still missing. Flooding hit more than 10 villages in the province, he added.
Estahban is 174 kilometers (108 miles) east of the provincial capital Shiraz.
Iran’s interior minister, Ahmad Vahidi, shared his condolences with the families of the flood victims, national television later reported.
Iran’s meteorology department had warned about possibly heavy seasonal rainfall across the country that is facing a decades-long drought blamed on climate change.
In March 2018, a flash flood in Fars province caused the death of 44 people.
Videos posted on local media and social media showed cars caught in the rising waters of the Roodball river and carried away while parents tried to rescue their children from the vehicles.
The tragedy happened on a summer weekend in Iran, when families tend to head to cooler areas such as riversides, lakesides and valleys.
“A number of local people and sightseers (from other areas) who had gone to the riverside and were present in the river bed were caught in the flood due to the rise in the water level,” Kargar added.
Iran has endured repeated droughts over the past decade, but also regular floods, a phenomenon made worse when torrential rain falls on sun-baked earth.
Photos released by Iran’s Red Crescent Society showed rescuers walking on cracked dry soil while others worked among reeds.
In 2019, heavy inundations in the country’s south left at least 76 people dead and caused damage estimated at more than $2 billion.
In January two people were initially reported killed in flash flooding in Fars when heavy rains hit the area, but the toll rose to at least eight there and elsewhere in Iran’s south.
Scientists say climate change amplifies extreme weather, including droughts as well as the potential for the increased intensity of rain storms.
Like other nearby countries, Iran has suffered chronic dry spells and heat waves for years, and these are expected to worsen.
Last November, tens of thousands of people gathered in the parched riverbed of the country’s Zayandeh Rood river, which runs through the central city of Isfahan, to complain about the drought and blame officials for diverting water.
The drying up of a lake once regarded as the Middle East’s largest is a regular news item in the Iranian media.
Lake Urmia, in the mountains of northwest Iran, began shrinking in 1995 due to a combination of prolonged drought, and the extraction of water for farming and dams, according to the UN Environment Program.
In neighboring Iraq in December, 12 people died in flash floods that swept through the north of that country, despite severe drought.