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.
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