Qadir Nagar:
Two days before her wedding, Noor Muhammad had a long phone call with her mother, just a few hours before devastating floods in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa they killed her along with 23 relatives and family members.
“I can’t explain how happy he was,” he stood next to the rubble of the great house of 36 rooms of his family, perched on the edge of a flood water channel in the village of Qadir Nagar.
The town in the mountain district of Buner has been the worst blow for the recent massive rain in the country, which represents more than 200 deaths of almost 400 on floods in the northwest since August 15.
Buner is three and a half hours by car from the capital Islamabad. “Everything was finished,” he sob Muhammad, 25, while the mourners sat at his house damaged to offer condolences, saying that there was nothing left when he came home, except the debris and heavy rocks, who swept the mountains together with the mud waters and the furious flood, crashed into houses, markets and buildings.
“The flood arrived, a great flood arrived, swept everything, home, mother, sister, brother, my uncle, my grandfather and children.”
Muhammad works as a worker in Malaysia. He arrived at Islamabad airport on August 15 to drive home, where their wedding preparations were in full swing for two days later. Instead, he attended 24 funerals. They included their mother, a brother and a sister, he said, adding that his father and another brother survived because they had gone to pick him up at the airport.
The rest of the deaths were among the families of their uncles who shared the house built by their grandfather and relatives who attend their marriage. His fiance survived. His house was far from the worst of the damage.
Sudden devastating floods
The sudden floods caused by the worst of the monsoon and the clouds of this year, which began in the mountainous northwest have extended to other parts of the country of 240 million, which carries death and destruction on a large scale.
The authorities have said that the longest spell of heavy rains and rare clouds were based on climate change due to global warming, for fear that intensity will increase in the coming years.
“We and our elders have never seen a storm like this in our lives,” said Muhammad Zeb, 28, resident in Buner. It was a complete chaos and a massive disaster, he added. “You can see for yourself, this was a beautiful place with houses. But now, as you can see, flood and storm have swept everything.”
An unknown number of people remains missing, with corpses still recovered, authorities said. The number of deaths in general throughout the country in the rains of the Monzón that began at the end of June was 776, according to the National Disaster Management Authority, which said that more than 25,000 people had been rescued in the Northwest.
The Army and the Air Force have joined the rescue and relief efforts. The officials have warned about more storms ahead with two other monzonic rain spells that are expected until September 10.
Buner received more than 150 mm (5.91 inches) of rain within an hour activated by a cloud in the most destructive event this season of Monzón. A cloud is a rare phenomenon where more than 100 mm (3.9 inches) of rain within an hour in a small area. Only four people of the 28 at home survived, Muhammad said. “What else can we say? It is God’s will,” he said.
