Printed On 31 Aug 2025
Almost half one million folks have been displaced by flooding in japanese Pakistan after days of heavy rain swelled rivers, aid officers mentioned, as they carried out an enormous rescue operation.
Three transboundary rivers that lower via Punjab province, which borders India, have swollen to exceptionally excessive ranges, affecting greater than 2,300 villages.
Nabeel Javed, the top of the Punjab authorities’s aid companies, mentioned on Saturday that 481,000 folks stranded by the floods had been evacuated, together with 405,000 livestock.
Total, greater than 1.5 million folks have been affected by the flooding, together with in Lahore, the provincial capital and the nation’s second-largest metropolis.
“That is the most important rescue operation in Punjab’s historical past,” Irfan Ali Khan, the top of the province’s catastrophe administration company, mentioned at a information convention.
He mentioned greater than 800 boats and a few 1,300 rescue personnel had been concerned in evacuating households from affected areas, principally positioned in rural areas close to the banks of the three rivers.
The most recent spell of monsoon flooding because the begin of the week has killed 30 folks, he mentioned, with lots of left useless all through the heavier-than-usual season that started in June.
“No human life is being left unattended. Every kind of rescue efforts are persevering with,” Khan mentioned.
Greater than 500 aid camps have been set as much as present shelter to households and their livestock. Within the impoverished city of Shahdara, on the outskirts of Lahore, dozens of households had been gathered in a college after fleeing the rising water of their houses.
In mid-August, greater than 400 Pakistanis had been killed in a matter of days by landslides attributable to torrential rain on the opposite facet of the nation, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, near Afghanistan and the one province held by the opposition to the federal authorities.
In 2022, unprecedented monsoon floods submerged a 3rd of Pakistan, with the southern province of Sindh being the worst-affected space.
