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.
The post Once a Source of Life and Renewal, Monsoon Brings Death to Pakistan appeared first on New York Times.
