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Asia Pacific|Deadly Floods in Punjab Devastate Pakistan’s Breadbasket
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/world/asia/summer-monsoon-floods-pakistan.html
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Housing communities and businesses that rely on agriculture have been destroyed in the country’s largest province.
Aug. 31, 2025Updated 11:07 a.m. ET
Madeeha Bawar Ali sobbed quietly on the rooftop of her neighbor, as men gathered around looked out over 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 Ms. Ali, 25, as her husband and two boys, ages 2 and 6, 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.”
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