Rescuers backed by troops evacuated more than 25,000 people from the eastern Pakistani city of Jalalpur Pirwala overnight as rising rivers threatened to flood low-lying neighborhoods, provincial disaster officials said Monday.
The emergency operation began late Sunday and continued through the night, Punjab Disaster Management Authority Director General Irfan Ali Kathia said. By Monday morning, roughly 25,000 residents from high-risk areas had been moved to safer locations and were receiving tents and food supplies, authorities said. The city has an estimated population of nearly 700,000.
The evacuations followed a fatal incident on the city’s outskirts two days earlier, when a rescue boat capsized in floodwaters, killing five people and leaving 15 others rescued, local officials said. The provincial administration, assisted by the military and police, has been conducting one of the largest rescue operations in Punjab, using helicopters to airlift stranded people and deploying drones to assess inundated areas. Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif has been monitoring the response from a central control room, officials said.
Flooding has so far affected more than 4.1 million people across 4,100 villages in 25 districts of Punjab, the disaster authority reported. Kathia said surging waters have displaced over 2 million people across Punjab since heavy rains and releases from upstream dams began overwhelming rivers on Aug. 23; only about 60,000 of those displaced are in official relief camps, with most sheltering with relatives or in makeshift sites along river embankments.
Since Aug. 26, at least 56 people have died in flood-related incidents in the province, officials said. Nationwide, Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority has recorded more than 900 deaths from monsoon-related flooding since late June.
Authorities have warned that releases of water from Indian dams earlier this season, combined with torrential monsoon rains, have swelled the Ravi, Chenab and Sutlej rivers and contributed to the current emergency. The NDMA said India again notified Islamabad over the weekend through diplomatic channels of potential cross-border flooding.
Evacuations were also under way in neighboring Sindh province, where more than 100,000 people have been relocated from vulnerable settlements as waters continue to flow downstream into the Indus River. Sindh was among the worst-hit regions in Pakistan’s catastrophic 2022 floods, which killed 1,739 people nationwide.
Local residents described rising water encroaching on homes and farmland. Ghulam Shabir, a 50-year-old construction worker, said he moved to higher ground near the city after floodwater entered his village and appealed to authorities to hasten rescue efforts for those still stranded.
Officials said mosques broadcast evacuation announcements as residents scrambled onto vehicles amid heavy rain, and that rescue teams would continue operations until waters recede and risk levels drop.