Authorities Search for Missing After Single Day of Rain Kills Hundreds in India and Pakistan

Search crews in Pakistan on Tuesday continued to look for flash flood victims five days after cloudbursts dumped massive amounts of rain in the country's northwest. The flooding has killed hundreds of people.

A new storm on Monday in the same province killed 20. That brought the death toll from flash floods this summer to 650. At least half died in a single day on August 15. Sixty others were killed across the border in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Hundreds remain missing. 

Experts cited a number of factors that made the flooding worse. Poor drainage and unplanned development made the impacts of the floods worse. But the main driver of the heavy rains is climate change, they say.   

Khalid Khan told The Associated Press (AP) that rising temperatures around the world are “leading to more intense and erratic rainfall. Khan is a climate expert who heads a group called PlanetPulse. “Climate change is making rare events more frequent, and frequent events more destructive." 

Khan explained that a warming planet is drawing moisture into the atmosphere. The warmer air causes it to hold in clouds longer. Then it is released in sudden cloudbursts. Cloudbursts unload massive amounts of rain in very short periods of time. Last week's cloudburst dropped 6 inches of rain in an hour in Pakistan's Buner district. The floods were likely worsened by glacier melt and wetland loss, experts said.    

Survivors complained that there was no warning system in place to trigger evacuations.

“If people had been informed earlier, lives could have been saved,” Mohammad Iqbal told the AP. He is a local schoolteacher.

But a disaster management official told the AP there’s “no forecasting system anywhere in the world” that can predict when and where a cloudburst will strike.  

Reflect: What’s something you think your community could do to be better prepared for a natural disaster?

Photo of people wading through flooded streets in Pakistan from Reuters.