OKARA: The coursing floods in eastern Pakistan first swallowed corn crop, then the cattle that fed on it.
Swaths of Pakistan's breadbasket were inundated this month, with at least 130,000 people evacuated, after the Sutlej river burst its banks and spilled over hundreds of villages and thousands of acres.
People retreated to the roof to escape the rising water, before fleeing for their lives by boat.
"We didn't bring any of our belongings with us, everything we own is abandoned back there," said Bibi, who guesses her age in the 30s, from a relief camp inside a school in Mandi Ahmedabad, a village in eastern Punjab province.
With the water slowly receding, a ramshackle armada of 40 boats makes twice-daily food and aid deliveries to 80 water-bound villages where men perch on roofs guarding sodden possessions.
The floodwaters are still some 2.4 metres deep, and the boats skim past the tops of waterlogged corn stalks blanched by the sun.
Mud houses lie in ruins, with tumbled walls pooled in stagnant water, in Falak De Bheni, a village surrounded by drowned fields of sesame and rice.
"I don't want to plant a crop here next year, my heart can't bear it," Muhammad Tufail, 38, said as he stood at his ruined door surveying the damage.
More than 175 people were killed in Pakistan in rain-related incidents since the monsoon season began in late June, mainly due to electrocution and buildings collapsing, emergency services have reported.
Large tracts of rural Pakistan were ruined by record monsoon floods last summer that scientists linked to climate change and from which it is still recovering.
A third of the country was submerged and 1,700 people were killed, while eight million were displaced.
The villages along the Sutlej River were spared in that deluge but are now battling the highest water levels in 35 years, authorities have said.
The assistant commissioner of Dipalpur -- the hardest-hit area in this year's flood -- said 11 rescue centres and five relief camps had been set up, with 4,600 emergency boat trips made since the floods came in mid-August.
The flooded villages of Dipalpur remain without electricity two weeks after the floods started.
Most of the cattle have been evacuated but those left behind have nothing left to feed on. — AFP
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
