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New York Times
2 days ago
- Climate
- New York Times
Once a Source of Life and Renewal, Monsoon Brings Death to Pakistan
Walking to his local mosque in northern Pakistan, Abdul Samad cast worried looks at a stream he had never seen so agitated and choked with debris. When he stepped outside again 10 minutes later, the mountain village that was his lifelong home had been nearly erased. Swollen by pummeling rainfall, the stream had turned into a roaring torrent that swept mud, rocks and fallen trees through the village of Beshonai on Friday, crushing, burying or washing away everything in its path. Out of 210 homes, only 25 remain standing, according to local officials. 'Houses, fields of maize, everything was gone. All I saw were boulders upon boulders,' said Mr. Samad, an imam in his mid 40s. His wife and daughter were swept away with the family home and killed. His mother's body was not found until Monday, three miles downstream. The monsoon season, once revered as a source of life and renewal, has brought death and devastation across large parts of Pakistan, a South Asian nation of 250 million people. Monsoons have killed more than 700 people nationwide since the season began in late June. This increasingly frequent pattern is forcing Pakistan to reckon with a new reality: Destruction brought by extreme weather has become the norm, not the exception. In northern Pakistan, floods cascaded down mountain slopes last week, eradicating entire villages. Boulders and pine trees smashed through houses. Mud swallowed whole families. Beshonai Kabul AFGHANISTAN Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Quetta PAKISTAN IRAN INDIA Arabian Sea 200 miles By The New York Times Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
3 days ago
- Climate
- New York Times
‘Like Death Visited Every Home': A Pakistani Village Is Hit by Torrential Rains
As dozens of villages hit by flash floods buried their dead across northern Pakistan on Monday, mourners had to cover the freshly dug graves with plastic tarps because the relentless rain gave no respite. Nearly 350 people have died in flash floods since torrential rains began falling on northern Pakistan on Friday. Officials warned that the death toll was likely to be much higher and would grow as countless collapsed buildings remained inaccessible, and with more precipitation expected in the coming days. 'It was like death visited every home,' Abdul Haleem, a local religious figure in the village of Beshonai, said on Monday after leading another burial — the sixth of the day. In Beshonai, a village of 4,000 people with a river snaking through its center, funerals have gone on nearly uninterrupted for days. Most of the deaths since Friday have been registered in the district of Buner, in the northwestern region of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, which sits near the border with Afghanistan. Only 25 out of 400 houses were left undamaged in the village, according to local officials. The sudden heavy rains caught Pakistani authorities off guard, they said, despite dozens of millions of dollars committed to early monitoring systems over the past several years. And the deluges have highlighted how devastating and increasingly heavier rainfalls have become a recurring phenomenon for Pakistan, just a few years after record floods in 2022 submerged a third of the country. In 2022, heavy rains mostly flooded the flat plains of the Sindh region. The clouds over the past week have instead burst in mountainous areas where the streams wreaked havoc as rainwater made its way downhill. At least 660 people have died in rain-related incidents across Pakistan since monsoon season began in late June, according to the national disaster management agency, and 935 more have been injured. In Beshonai and nearby villages, rescue workers continued their search for missing people, but they were hampered by mud, boulders, fallen trees and electricity poles blocking the roads. More than 100 people were still missing as of Monday in Beshonai alone, according to Waseem Akthar, a district official. The provincial government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa released approximately $4.6 million in emergency relief funds, including nearly $1.8 million for the worst-hit district of Buner, where thousands of people have been displaced. 'There are still people missing,' said Syed Alam, a teacher turned volunteer who has been searching alongside rescue teams. 'Every minute matters, but the roads are clogged.' Elian Peltier contributed reporting from Islamabad.
