Pakistan: Thousands evacuated due to flooding

Around 100,000 people have been evacuated in Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province due to flooding, emergency services said on Wednesday.

“We have rescued 100,000 people and transferred them to safer places,” Punjab emergency services spokesperson Farooq Ahmad said.

Rescue boats travelled from village to village over the past several days, collecting people forced to wait on the roofs of their homes as the water level rose around them.

Pakistan’s chief meteorologist covering floods, Muhammad Aslam, said the river level was at its highest in 35 years.

Punjab’s disaster management agency warned that monsoon rains could exacerbate flooding in the coming days.

More than 175 people died in the monsoon season

Emergency services reported that more than 175 people have died since the beginning of the monsoon season in late June.

Several hundred villages and thousands of acres of cropland were inundated when the Sutlej River burst its banks on Sunday.

Punjjab’s chief minister, Mohsin Naqvi, said monsoon rains had prompted Indian authorities to release reservoir water into the Sutlej, causing flooding downstream into Pakistan.

The Sutlej River is a tributary of the Indus that runs through the Punjab region in India and Pakistan. Under the terms of the Indus Water Treaty that governs the major waterway and its five tributaries, the Sutlej is assigned to New Delhi.

Pakistan is still recovering from devastating floods in 2022 that affected over 33 million people and killed 1,739. They caused $30 billion (€27.6 billion) in damage to the country’s economy.