At first, when we drove down to the village on the banks of the Kabul River, things didn’t look that devastating. Yes, the roads had turned into muddy fields and large crowds of people had gathered in the streets, but it only takes a little rain to cause havoc and in Pakistan, crowds can appear in seconds because of the smallest incident.

Of course, it was no small incident that had occurred.

In the early days of the record-breaking monsoon rains at the end of July, towns and villages were already being washed away in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. By July 31 in Nowshera District, the statistics and reports were already horrible:

• the worst flooding since 1929
• 430 people killed in a week
• 400,000 people stranded in far-flung villages
• 1 million people affected
• evacuees at a small relief camp were suffering from diarrhea and skin problems causing itching: children and the elderly were the worst off
• fever and cough were prevalent
• thousands of homes and roads destroyed
• at least 45 bridges across the northwest were damaged

When we reached Mohalla Malla, down a steep slope from the main GT Road in Akora Khattak, it looked like it was still standing. It was and it wasn’t. The water had receded, and once we started to walk around, we saw the signs of the floods: they were mistakable and unbelievable. Whole buildings had been reduced to piles of rubble. The devastation seemed selective, though. While one house fell, the one next to it stood on. While the boundary wall of another building collapsed, the walls of one across the lane still stood, but a door was hanging by one rusty hinge. Sacks of wheat lay soaked, ruined and discarded in alleys. Piles of belongings — clothes, blankets, shredded boxes, cushions — lined the side of the road, pressed up against walls, pushed there but surging waters that flowed through the streets and into and out of houses, carrying away loose items. Water-logged and wasted household items formed nature-made garbage dumps (see a photo gallery here).

Water stains on the buildings showed the level of the once raging river. The stains were above the tops of doors, many at least 12 feet above street level. But the Kabul River, which joins the Indus farther south near Attock, had actually risen much more.

“It seems like it has returned to its normal level,” I said as I watched the water flowing in front of me, contained within its banks.

“No, not at all,” said Noor, a field manager with the Omar Asghar Khan Development Foundation (OAKDF). “The river is still seven to eight feet above its normal level.”

The river was flowing quickly, but standing there it was still was hard to imagine how one river could overflow so much. If the river was already eight feet higher than normal and it reached the tops of roofs over 40 metres away where the street elevation was already about 10 feet higher the riverbank, it meant the river rose by about 30 feet. Moreover, the water spilled out, covering an area much wider than the river itself and still swallowed up homes and villages. The actual volume of water was impossible to imagine. The photographs we have all seen in the press definitely provide a sense of the amount of water that has inundated towns across the nation. But in many ways, trying to truly comprehend the amount of water needed to cause the river to surge for kilometres, making the water level rise in the streets and forcing people to their rooftops was incomprehensible. The water-stained wall in front of me was, however, proof of the impossible. As were the fallen buildings, though they made the area look like an earthquake zone, rather than a flood zone.

The statistics of the human and material loss for KP as of August 20 (shown below), a month after the monsoon began, show a province that has suffered immensely and continues to suffer, again. This is a region that has already suffered through years of turmoil: suicide bombings, Taliban rule, military operations, displacement. More people have been killed and injured, and more houses completely destroyed in KP than any other province (though Sindh has more than double the amount of affected persons: almost 3.7 million according to the Federal Flood Commission).

We left Nowshera on August 15. On August 16 the rains started again in the north-west. They continued on and off for most of the week. By August 17, my cousin received this SMS from a different relief worker we had been coordinating with: “We are in a major crisis. Nowshera has reflooded due to yesterday’s rain. MET is predicting more rains in coming weeks. We were preparing people for early rehab in 15 days. But now water-borne diseases are spreading.”

Not all areas of Nowshera District were hit badly during that most recent flooding. Luckily, the residents of Mohalla Malla were unaffected, said Noor from OAKDF, when I spoke to him over the phone for an update.

Here is a snapshot of the situation in KP (as reported in the Federal Flood Commission’s “Daily Flood Report” from August 20):

• Villages Affected: 581
• People Affected: 1,561,711
• People Killed: 1,015
• People Injured: 1,000
• Houses Fully Destroyed: 108,279
• Relief Camps Established: 49
• Heads of Cattle Perished: 8,438

Read about the Omar Asghar Khan Development Foundation’s work in Akora Khattakhere.

To view a photo gallery of mohalla Malla in Akora Khattak, clickhere.