Pakistanis struggle to help storm victims

QUETTA, Pakistan, June 27 (Reuters) - Pakistani rescue workers today struggled to reach villagers, some stranded in trees, after a cyclone hit the coast.

Early rainy season storms in South Asia have killed nearly 400 people since late last week and more bad weather for at least parts of the region was on the way, weather officials said. Up to 60,000 people in the southwestern Pakistani province of Baluchistan were affected by a cyclone that hit on Tuesday, killing at least 17 people.

''The situation is out of our hands, it's out of control. The entire town has been inundated and people have taken refuge in tall buildings and trees,'' Rauf Rind, the mayor of the town of Kach, told Reuters by telephone.

The Kach district was also in danger from an over-flowing dam, said provincial government spokesman Raziq Bugti.

Stretches of road and several bridges along the coast have been swept away while communications with worst-hit areas are patchy and much of the coast is without power, officials said.

''We are really facing difficulties in evacuating stranded residents,'' said Bugti. ''There's no road links and we have just one option -- that's helicopters -- but they can't be used unless the sky is clear.'' Scattered rain was expected until tomorrow.

Head of a provincial disaster management authority, Khuda Bakhsh Baluch, said about 35 villages had been inundated.

''Many of the houses were built of mud and they collapsed because of the water,'' he said.

Tropical cyclone Yemyin hit Baluchistan three days after another storm struck Karachi, Pakistan's biggest city, killing about 230 people, many when fierce wind brought down slum houses.

Karachi was spared the full force of the cyclone but nevertheless five people were killed, an ambulance service official said.

Power was restored today to most of Karachi but up to 10 percent of the city was still without electricity, a power corporation official said.

The navy rescued 146 fishermen, including seven whose boat sank, but there was no information on the crew of another boat that sank, Navy spokesman Captain Siddiq Akbar said.

A ship had been sent to rescue the crew of a foreign merchant vessel, he added.

REUTERS SYU PM1527