30/11/2025
In Margi, the largest village in the remote Warwan Valley with more than 500 households, families who survived the devastating cloudbursts in August are bracing for a winter that often brings temperatures plunging to minus 20 degrees Celsius - still without rebuilt homes, cleared debris or a clear plan for reconstruction.
For Abdul Rashid, a 50-year-old labourer, the season ahead is frightening.
He has been living in a tin shed with his wife, three sons and two daughters since flash floods swept through Margi on August 26. His married son, along with his wife and two children, occupies a small partition of the same makeshift shelter.
“We are forced to live in this shed amid this nail-biting cold as we have nowhere else to go,” Rashid said. “Even the debris they promised to remove is still lying around the village. Where would we construct the house?”
He said the family managed to climb to a hillock when flash floods triggered by the cloudbursts roared down from Shilancer Nalla.
