Deadly Floods in Punjab Devastate Pakistan’s Breadbasket

LAHORE, Pakistan – Madeeha Bawar Ali sobbed quietly on the rooftop of her neighbor’s house, as men gathered around to survey 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, ate a meager 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 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.

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.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.