Rescue workers patrol the swollen Ravi River in Lahore, Pakistan. Housing, communities, and businesses that rely on agriculture have been destroyed in Pakistan’s largest province. Photo / Asim Hafeez, The New York Times
Madeeha Bawar Ali sobbed quietly on the rooftop of her neighbour’s house, as men gathered around to look out over the devastation brought by floods that their city in Pakistan had not seen in nearly 40 years.
“We built our house with our own hands, and now it’s gone,” said Ali, 25, as her husband and two boys, aged 2 and 6, ate a meagre lunch of lentils in silence one morning last week.
A fan, a television screen and a few other hastily gathered belongings sat nearby in metal boxes — a life’s worth of savings now cluttered on a roof battered by the heavy rains that triggered deadly flooding and submerged large parts of Punjab province.
The Punjab floods are the latest in a string of extreme weather events this year that have wrought devastation across Pakistan, a country of 250 million people.
Overflowing rivers turned villages into islands; urban flooding forced residents to trudge along the streets of Karachi through waist-high water; and glacial outbursts swallowed entire communities in the country’s mountainous north.
“There have been so many extreme weather events at once — the urban floods, the cloudbursts, the glacial outbursts and now these floods in Punjab,” said Umair Afzal, a deputy manager for hydrology at Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Agency. “It’s overwhelming.”
Pakistan has endured heavier rain during monsoon seasons, which scientists have attributed to climate change.
But the floods this summer have hit many parts of the country, from the mountains to the plains, and more than 850 people have died in rain-related incidents since the monsoon season began in late June, according to the disaster management agency.
Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province and the country’s breadbasket, has suffered the second highest death toll in the country — 209 people as of Sunday.
The floods are likely to have a devastating impact on hundreds of thousands of people and businesses that rely on agriculture but have seen their impending harvest, just a few weeks off, washed away.
In Lahore, the provincial capital and Pakistan’s second largest city, the roaring Ravi River overflowed housing communities, both affluent and poor, built on its banks.
Nawaz Ali, the neighbour who welcomed the Ali family on his rooftop, had initially ignored evacuation instructions issued as heavy rains caused the Ravi to swell last week.
As water crept into his single-storey house on the outskirts of the city, he brought the family’s washing machine, mattresses and cooking gas canisters to the roof in a frantic attempt to save as much as he could.
“Financially we’ve lost everything but at least we’re still here,” Nawaz Ali said one morning last week as he scanned what little was left of his neighbourhood — lemon and mango orchards engulfed by muddy waters, grazing fields for livestock turned into pools, crumpled walls that marked where houses once stood.
The two Ali families, who are not related, were evacuated to a nearby school along hundreds of others.
But Nawaz Ali had come back: his house was still standing, and he had to protect his belongings.
Many others had no such luck.
At a nearby camp set up by a religious charity, hundreds of families who had lost their homes rested under white tents.
Their respite was short-lived. The tent camp where they sought refuge itself flooded on Saturday as rains kept battering the city.
In Punjab overall, the deluge has forced more than 750,000 people to evacuate their homes, and submerged the crops of rice, maize and other vegetables dotting once lush banks of rivers and canals.
Muhammad Nawaz, a farmer in the village of Ganda Sindh Wala, 55km south of Lahore and near the border with India, had been looking forward to his October harvest.
Like many farmers in Pakistan, Nawaz had borrowed money — in his case, around US$730 — to buy seeds and fertilisers on credit.
He had planned to repay the loan after selling his harvest, but “now I am deep in debt”, he said as he inspected his fields of paddy rice and corn, which were soaked in muddy waters one recent morning.
Farming livestock also constitutes a major source of income for villagers in Punjab.
In recent days, wooden barges with rescued families and cattle on board moved slowly through floodwaters, sailing down what had been roads cluttered with cars and rickshaws.
Even the barbed wire marking the border between Pakistan and India — where dozens have also died in floods this summer — was submerged.
The floods have added to the tensions between the two countries.
Pakistan has accused India of “weaponising water” and worsening the impact of the floods in Punjab by releasing water from dams upstream without providing details on how much or when those releases would occur.
India has not commented publicly on the accusations.
Coming just three years after record floods in 2022 submerged a third of Pakistan, the heavy rains have underscored just how devastating and intense rainfalls have become the norm, rather than the exception, for the country.
They have also raised questions about preparedness and provoked criticism of the authorities for failing to warn residents early enough or for letting deforestation go unchecked.
Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif has argued that not enough lessons were learned from the 2022 floods.
Climate researchers have concurred, arguing that human error, such as construction near rivers and late warnings from authorities, had worsened the impact of the heavy rains.
“Many of the catastrophes we have seen this summer — the floods in the north and in Punjab now — all have a common phenomenon: communities were in the way of the rivers and interfering with nature,” said Fazilda Nabeel, a climate and water governance expert and professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences.
Park View City — a high-end residential area that flooded in Lahore — was built recently, with the Government’s approval, on the banks of the Ravi River, despite repeated warnings from environmental activists and experts.
“Everyone knows about the risk of flooding because when you start construction here, engineers will tell you that it’s on the river bed,” Ahmed Akhbar, a retired banker living in Park View City, said last week as he tried to reach his house at the end of a flooded street.
Still, Akhbar said he had bought his plot because the land was inexpensive and ownership in the area came with lots of services.
“The government did their best,” he said about efforts to buffer Park View City from the Ravi, “but you can’t fight nature.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Elian Peltier and Zia ur-Rehman
Photographs by: Asim Hafeez
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