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LAHORE, Pakistan: Pakistan has evacuated tens of thousands of people to safer areas after neighboring India released water from overflowing dams and swollen rivers into low-lying border regions, officials said Tuesday.
The move came a day after New Delhi alerted Islamabad about possible cross-border flooding, marking the first public diplomatic contact between the two nuclear-armed rivals in months.
Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority said it had issued an advance alert to its Punjabi counterparts about a surge in the Sutlej River and the risk of flooding, and that evacuations from various districts in the eastern Punjab province were underway.
In a statement, it said rescuers evacuated more than 14,000 people from Kasur, a district in Punjab province, while over 89,000 were moved to safer ground from the city of Bahawalnagar, near the Indian border.
The NDMA said authorities have urged residents to stay away from rivers, streams and low-lying areas, avoid unnecessary travel, and follow alerts issued through the media, mobile phones and the NDMA’s disaster alert app.
The latest flood alert and evacuation drive by Pakistan comes as heavy monsoon rains continue to batter both South Asian countries.
In Pakistan’s northwest, many residents complained this month that they had received no warning before flash floods struck Buner district, killing more than 300 people. Officials have said the devastation was caused by a sudden cloudburst, which could not have been predicted, and that many of the victims were living along natural water pathways.
Nationwide, floods triggered by seasonal rains have killed more than 800 people in Pakistan since June 26.
In Kashmir, which is split between the two sides and claimed by both in its entirety, at least 65 have also died and hundreds have been displaced in the Indian-administered Jammu area.
Many of the region’s rivers and tributaries eventually flow into Pakistan and the part of Kashmir it controls. On Tuesday, Indian officials said most rivers and streams were overflowing, with muddy waters inundating homes in several places and damaging roads and bridges. Water levels in multiple rivers continued to rise in the region.
According to the Indian Meteorological Department, rains should persist until late Tuesday.
In 2014, Kashmir saw its worst monsoon flooding in a century, leaving 500 people dead across the region.
This week’s flood alert was conveyed to Pakistan through diplomatic channels rather than the Indus Waters Commission, the permanent mechanism created under the 1960 World Bank-brokered Indus Waters Treaty, which was suspended by New Delhi after the April killing of 26 tourists in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
Pakistan says India cannot scrap the treaty unilaterally. The treaty had earlier survived two wars between the countries, in 1965 and 1971, and a major border skirmish in 1999. The suspension of treaty and scaling down of diplomatic ties by India over the killing of tourists eventually set off tit-for-tat missile strikes by the both sides in May.
The exchange ended only after US President Donald Trump announced that he had brokered a ceasefire. Since then, the two sides have not taken steps to normalize ties.
Pakistan in recent months has witnessed multiple cloudburst floods and more than normal rainfall. Pakistan’s annual monsoon season runs from July through September.
Scientists and weather forecasters have blamed climate change for heavier rains in recent years in the region. This year’s heavy rains have raised fears of a repeat of the 2022 downpour, also blamed on climate change, that inundated a third of the country and killed 1,739 people.

A wildfire that destroyed four homes in central Oregon was starting to stabilize on Monday, authorities said, while a blaze in Northern California wine country has so far spared some of the state’s most famous vineyards.
Moisture helped the 1,200 firefighters battling Oregon’s Flat Fire, but more work needed to be done. Dry, hot weather had fueled a rapid expansion of the blaze across 88 square kilometers of rugged terrain in Deschutes and Jefferson counties since the fire began late Thursday.
“Gotta love Mother Nature. It brought in a little bit of rain. Cooled the temps, relative humidity came up,” Travis Medema, the state’s chief deputy state fire marshal, told a community meeting in the town of Sisters. “The incident, for the first time in the last three days, is really beginning to stabilize.”
Officials said firefighters had protective lines of some sort around the entire fire, including roads, but the fire remained at five percent containment.
Authorities at one point ordered evacuations for more than 4,000 homes but lifted orders for some areas in the evening.
A heat advisory was in place through Wednesday, and forecasters warned that potential thunderstorms could create erratic winds that would challenge firefighters.
Flames in California’s wine country
Meanwhile, the Pickett Fire in Northern California has charred about 26 square kilometers of remote Napa County, known for its hundreds of wineries. It was 15 percent contained on Monday.
Flames spared the home and adjacent vineyards of Jayson Woodbridge of Hundred Acre wines, but he said it was a close call on Thursday when the fire broke out and raced along nearby slopes.
He and his son grabbed hoses and futilely began spraying down the steep hillsides. “The water was evaporating as fast as we were spraying it out there,” Woodbridge recalled Monday. “It was just a hot funnel of air. Fire was just engulfing everything.”
Before long, crews with bulldozers and air support arrived to protect the property. Water-dropping helicopters continued their flights on Monday, keeping the flames contained to canyons about 130 kilometers north of San Francisco.
With about a month to go before harvest, Woodbridge said his grapes won’t be damaged because of the “pure luck” of wind direction.
“The smoke won’t affect the fruit because the wind’s coming in from the west, thankfully,” Woodbridge said. That wasn’t the case in 2020 when toxic smoke from the Glass Fire caused Woodbridge and other wineries to scrap much of that year’s crop.
There have been no reports of damage to any vineyards from the Pickett Fire, said Michelle Novi with Napa Valley Vintners, a nonprofit trade association.
Firefighting resources have been put in place to protect wineries, especially as winds pick up later in the day, according to the California Department of Forestry & Fire Protection, or Cal Fire.
“With the weather over the last 48 hours, we’re seeing high temperatures, low humidity paired with some increasing wind in the late afternoon, which was giving our troops some additional work on the eastern side of this incident,” Cal Fire spokesperson Curtis Rhodes said on Monday.
A firefighter dies in Montana
In southwest Montana, a 60-year-old contract firefighter from Oregon died Sunday afternoon, from a cardiac emergency while battling the Bivens Creek fire.
Ruben Gonzeles Romero was among more than 700 firefighters working on the lightning-caused fire in the Tobacco Root Mountains about 24 kilometers north of Virginia City, Montana.
The Bivens Creek fire has burned approximately nine square kilometers since Aug. 13 in a remote area with thick timber and numerous dead trees.
Heat wave complicates the firefighting efforts
Residents of the western United States have been sweltering in a heat wave that hospitalized some people, with temperatures hitting dangerous levels throughout the weekend in Washington, Oregon, Southern California, Nevada and Arizona.
After a weekend of triple-digit temperatures, authorities in Multnomah County, Oregon, said they were investigating the death of a 56-year-old man as possibly heat-related.
The area of the Oregon fire is in a high desert climate, where dried grasses and juniper trees are burning and fire is racing through tinder-dry canyon areas where it’s challenging to create containment lines, said Deschutes County sheriff’s spokesperson Jason Carr.
In central California, the state’s largest blaze this year, the Gifford Fire, was at 95 percent containment Monday after charring nearly 534 square kilometers of dry brush in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties since erupting on Aug. 1. The cause is under investigation.
Although it’s difficult to directly tie a single fire or weather event directly to climate change, scientists say human-caused warming from burning fossil fuels like coal and gas is causing more intense heat waves and droughts, which in turn set the stage for more destructive wildfires.