Severe floods in North Korea have left 300,000 people homeless, killed 83 people and destroyed 58,000 houses and more than 90,000 hectares (222,390 acres) of farmland, a senior U.N. official said.

U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Margareta Wahlstrom, the deputy emergency relief coordinator, said Thursday that about 60 people are missing in the storms which have also destroyed hundreds of bridges and a number of public buildings and affected pumping stations and power supplies.

The heavy rains and flooding have “very badly affected” four southern provinces where the country’s agricultural production is based, she said.

This week, U.N. staff in Pyongyang visited the province of North Hwanghae, European relief organizations visited South Pyongan, and the International Federation of the Red Cross visited North and South Hwanghae, South Pyongan, Kangwon and South Hamgyong for preliminary assessments, the U.N. said.

U.N. World Food Program representatives will travel Friday to 10 hard-hit counties to assess immediate needs.

“There are approximately 300,000 people who are homeless,” according to assessments by the U.N., the government and relief organizations, Wahlstrom told reporters on Thursday.

“About 58,000 houses (are) destroyed,” she said. “We’ve seen over 90,000 hectares of farmland which is flooded and about 60 missing, 83 dead so far.”

Wahlstrom said “about 10 percent of the population in the provinces in the south are affected.”

In North Hwanghae, she said about 70 percent of arable land has been affected and 50 percent of the health clinics destroyed.

According to an overview by U.N. relief officials in the region, more than 800 public buildings, 540 bridges, 70 sections of railway and more than 500 high voltage towers were destroyed, and more than 30 reservoirs and 450 agricultural structures were damaged.

In addition, the heavy rains have ruptured river banks in more than 800 places and dikes in 10 places, the U.N. said.

Wahlstrom said the flooding is as severe as last year and 2004, and U.N. and government officials are trying to assess whether it is of the same magnitude as the mid-1990s.

In 1995, the North said floods had displaced 5.4 million people, but international aid agencies found 500,000 homeless.

The North is especially vulnerable to the annual heavy summer rains that soak the Korean peninsula because its people remove natural vegetation from vast hillsides to grow more food to make up shortfalls from the official rationing system, increasing the risk of erosion and floods.

As a result of crop losses in last year’s floods, Wahlstrom said, the U.N. had already calculated there would be a one million metric ton deficit of food crops in North Korea, and with the destruction caused by the current flooding “it will get worse.”

The U.N. team that visited North Hwanghae was able to give out some medical supplies and shelter materials, but the flood victims need more resources, she said.

Luckily, Wahlstrom said, the U.N. World Food Program had been preparing to expand its operation in North Korea because it had been given a donation of $20 million (€14.9 million).

“What U.N. has in country will immediately be put at the disposal of the relief operation,” she said.

The U.N. and the North Koreans are now “defining what the needs will be,” Wahlstrom said.

“The most obvious, the most urgently needed will be food, will be medical support, and probably emergency shelter for many of the people,” she said.

Once North Korea’s needs are known, Wahlstrom said the U.N. will tap into a fund to provide relief in emergencies.

U.N. officials will also meet representatives of potential donor countries on Friday for initial consultations on mobilizing additional financial support for North Korea, Wahlstrom said.

The standard route to and from North Korea is by plane through Beijing, People’s Republic of China. Transport directly to and from South Korea has been possible on a limited scale from 2003, when a road was opened (bus tours, no private cars).

Roads
Fuel constraints and the near absence of private automobiles have relegated road transportation to a secondary role. The road network was estimated between 23,000 and 30,000 kilometers in 1990, of which only 1,717 kilometers–7.5 percent–are paved; the rest are of dirt, crushed stone, or gravel, and are poorly maintained. There are three major multilane highways: a 200-kilometer expressway connecting P’yongyang and Wonsan on the east coast, a forty-three-kilometer expressway connecting P’yongyang and its port, Namp’o, and a four-lane 100- kilometer highway linking P’yongyang and Kaesong. The overwhelming majority of the estimated 264,000 vehicles in use in 1990 were for the military. Rural bus service connects all villages, and cities have bus and tram services.

Railways
Railroads, the main means of transportation, had a total route length of 5,045 kilometers in 1990. In 1990 railroads hauled 90 percent of all freight, with 7 percent carried on roads and 3 percent of transport hauled by water. The comparative figures for passenger traffic were 62 percent, 37 percent, and 1 percent, respectively. By 1990 approximately 63 percent of the rail network was electrified, an important factor in improving traction capacity in mountainous terrain. Two major lines run north-south, one each along the east and west coasts. Two eastwest lines connect Pyongyang and Wonsan by a central and a southerly route, and a part of a third link line constructed in the 1980s connects provinces in the mountainous far north near the Chinese border. The railroad system is linked with those of China and Russia, although gauge inconsistencies necessitated some dual gauging with Russia. The Third Seven-Year Plan targeted an increase of 60 percent for railroad traffic through continued efforts in electrification, development of centralized and containerized transport, and modernization of transport management.

The first section of the Pyongyang Metro opened in 1973, and presently comprises 30.5 km on two lines, although as of 2007 it is unclear whether it is presently operating. Built with some stations at a depth of over 100m, it also doubles as an emergency shelter.

Waterways
Water transport on the major rivers and along the coasts plays only a minor, but probably growing, role in freight and passenger traffic. Except for the Yalu and Taedong rivers, most of the inland waterways, totaling 2,253 kilometers, are navigable only by small craft. Coastal traffic is heaviest on the eastern seaboard, whose deeper waters can accommodate larger vessels. The major ports are Namp’o on the west coast and Najin, Ch’ngjin, Wnsan, and Hamh ng on the east coast. The country’s harbor loading capacity in the 1990s was estimated at almost 35 million tons a year. In the early 1990s, North Korea possessed an oceangoing merchant fleet, largely domestically produced, of sixtyeight ships (of at least 1,000 gross-registered tons), totaling 465,801 gross-registered tons (709,442 deadweight tons), which includes fifty-eight cargo ships and two tankers. There is a continuing investment in upgrading and expanding port facilities, developing transportation–particularly on the Taedong River–and increasing the share of international cargo by domestic vessels.

Airports
North Korea’s international air connections are limited. There are regularly scheduled flights (about once or twice a week) from the international airport at Sunan–twenty-four kilometers north of P’yongyang–to Moscow, Khabarovsk, and Beijing, and irregular flights from Sunan to Tokyo as well as to East European countries, the Middle East, and Africa. Information on the frequency of the latter flights is not available. An agreement to initiate a service between P’yongyang and Tokyo was signed in 1990. Internal flights are limited to routes between P’yongyang, Hamhng, Wnsan, and Ch’ngjin. All civil aircraft, an estimated eighteen planes in 1991, were purchased from the Soviet Union. From 1976 to 1978, three Tu-154 jets were added to the small fleet of propeller-driven An-24s.