6 things to know about the historic flooding in Pakistan

Pakistan has endured eight monsoons since the beginning of the summer, and the most recent one brought unprecedented flooding to the entire country. Here are six major takeaways compiled by the AccuWeather news team about the natural ongoing natural disaster unfolding there.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said Tuesday that the almost-nonstop flooding in the country since June has been "the worst in the history of Pakistan," according to AFP.

"The damage to our infrastructure is vast and is spread all over Pakistan," he told reporters at a briefing detailing the government's relief and rehabilitation efforts.

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United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres called the disaster a "monsoon on steroids" and blamed "the relentless impact of epochal levels of rain and flooding," before announcing U.N. relief efforts in the region. He also made a push for further climate action.

"Let's stop sleepwalking towards the destruction of our planet by climate change," Guterres said. "Today, it's Pakistan. Tomorrow, it could be your country."

Pakistan's Minister for Climate Change Sherry Rehman said on Thursday that the floods were "unprecedented" and "the worst humanitarian disaster of this decade," according to CNN.

"Pakistan is going through its eighth cycle of monsoon while normally the country has only three to four cycles of rain," Rehman said. "The percentages of super flood torrents are shocking."

The country's planning minister said early damage estimates are at least $10 billion for all the flooding since June, according to the BBC.

Not all hope is lost, however, because there have been many instances of Pakistani residents working together to save those trapped by the torrential flooding.

A group of residents and emergency responders used a clever combination of rope and a bed frame to carry a young boy to safety across a river of floodwater, seemingly several feet deep.

Another video shows a rescue team braving treacherous waters in a dinghy to save a trapped 13-year-old boy. Pakistani emergency services posted the video, which shows the teenager stuck on a rock in the middle of the Panjkora River. Two rescuers paddled toward the boy in a dinghy, before helping him into their boat.

In a similar river rescue, a military helicopter was used to rescue a boy trapped in a flooded stream on Aug. 28, airlifting him to safety.

However, there weren't just people being saved during the catastrophe. Workers at a dog shelter in Pakistan were able to rescue 250 pups right before the worst of the flooding reached their area, according to the BBC. Rescuers were also able to rescue a small cat by carrying it across a tightrope.

Since the flooding is so extensive, the only real way to understand its full scope is to view it from above.

New satellite images from tech companies Maxar and Planet Labs showed the daunting amount of water that has built up in Pakistan since about mid-June, when the flooding started. The areas that sit along the Indus River have suffered from the worst flooding, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Earth Observatory. The river and Hamal Lake -- roughly 30 miles apart -- have been inundated with so much water that they've merged to form a massive inland lake.

Over the course of several flooding events this summer, there have been catastrophic casualties, injuries and damages. Here are the updated numbers.

A man looks for salvageable belongings from his flooded home in the Shikarpur district of Sindh Province, Pakistan, Thursday, Sep. 1, 2022. (AP Photo/Fareed Khan)

From the beginning of August, rainfall was five times higher than normal across the whole country, and up to nine times higher in certain areas like Sindh province, according to The Guardian.

Pakistan has suffered regular flooding, heat waves and wildfires since 2010.

"Climate change is really affecting us," Fahad Saeed, a climate scientist with the Climate Analytics group, who is based in Islamabad, told The Guardian. "It has become a norm now that every year we kind of face extreme events."

That devastating rainfall led to about a third of the entire country being completely underwater, according to the European Space Agency. More than 30 million people have been affected in some way by the floods, which equals about one in seven Pakistani residents. More than 1,100 civilians have died, including hundreds of children, while at least 1,500 more have been injured. Almost 500,000 people have been displaced and moved into temporary disaster relief camps.

According to Bloomberg, over a million homes, almost 2,180 miles of road and 162 bridges have been either damaged or destroyed. In response, the U.N. has requested about $160 million in aid funds, while NPR reported cargo planes and trucks are arriving from across the greater region to provide necessities.

An elderly man wade through floodwaters in Charsadda, Pakistan, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2022. (AP Photo/Mohammad Sajjad)

The rains and floods have also heavily damaged crops and food reserves, causing the government to announce that they're expecting a nationwide food shortage in the near future, which would not only affect everyone within the country, but also Pakistan's trade partners.

"The agricultural sector is in turmoil. The cotton crop and vegetables are completely wiped out in many key areas," Ahmad Jawad, vice president of Pakistan Businesses Forum, who grows wheat, maize, citrus and sugarcane, told Bloomberg. "Wild weather just can't give us a break. First the heat wave, now floods."

On top of that, some doctors said on Wednesday that initially they were seeing mostly patients traumatized by the flooding, but are now treating people suffering from diarrhea, skin infections and other waterborne ailments in the country's flood-hit areas.

Many news outlets have compared this year's flooding to that of 2010, but how much worse was the flooding a decade ago?

A flood-affected resident Hamid Iqbal sits on the rubble of his house collapsed by heavy flood in Dagona near Nowshera, Pakistan on Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2010. (AP Photo/Anjum Naveed)

In 2010, the monsoonal rains in Pakistan persisted much longer and more intensely than normal, resulting in flooding even worse than what the country was in the midst of over the weekend.

There were weeks of rain, totaling 70 percent above normal in July and 102 percent above normal in August, according to NASA. A similar basin spread over hundreds of square kilometers when the flooding overflowed the Manchhar Lake and it merged with nearby rivers and streams.

The U.S. Agency for International Development estimated that the Pakistan floods impacted over 20 million people, caused 1,961 fatalities and damaged or destroyed 1.9 million homes.

The weather events leading up to this year's flooding are almost identical to those of 2010, which may have been the worst flooding in Pakistan's history.

"[There were] almost identical meteorological setups between 2010 and this year, almost identical impacts, although there were almost at least 2,000 deaths in 2010," said AccuWeather Lead International Forecaster Jason Nicholls. "We're not quite there this year and hopefully we don't get there. But as far as damage, widespread damage across all of Pakistan the two years are almost identical."

Nicholls further explained those weather setups and how the flooding happened in the first place.

"La Niña conditions continued through the season [and] that favors heavy rainfall in Pakistan. We also had warm waters over the Bay of Bengal that led to several lows forming over the Bay of Bengal, tracking across the central Indian [Ocean] going into Pakistan," Nicholls said. "We also had a couple tropical depressions form over the northern Arabian Sea, favorable water temperatures in both the Northern Pacific and Atlantic led to favorable conditions and enhanced rainfall across Pakistan."

Further compounding the intensity of this disaster is that the monsoons come hot off the heels of a hotter than normal spring, which caused yet more floods.

Back in May, Pakistan and neighboring India were gripped by an intense heat wave that led to weeks of dangerous air quality and rampaging wildfires. Then, the Shishper Glacier in northern Pakistan started to quickly melt, sending destructive floodwaters downstream.

The Hassanabad Bridge in Pakistan's Hunza Valley was completely destroyed. The concrete blocks that kept it up gave way under the pressure. The destroyed bridge cut the connection between northern Pakistan and China on the Karakoram Highway, a popular tourist attraction famed for being one of the highest paved roads in the world. The floodwaters also destroyed two power plants.

Correction: A previous graphic in this story improperly labeled where Afghanistan and Turkmenistan are located. Afghanistan borders Pakistan to the west, while Turkmenistan is situated between the Caspian Sea and Afghanistan's northwestern border.

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