Kashmir has a history of some of the devastating floods. The most recent was in 2014. A number of floods of massive scale have been reported from twentieth and nineteenth centuries. There was a massive disaster following heavy rainfalls in 1893. The floods, which in the day were classified as the “greatest flood ever known”, came down the Valley and Srinagar on 23 July 1903, converting the city into “a whole lake”. According to Saligram Bhatt in his 2004-book Kashmir Ecology and Environment: New Concerns and Strategies, the water level in the 1903 floods were higher by 3 points as compared to the one that had hit the state a decade earlier. Bhatt wrote, “7,000 dwellings went down in the neighbourhood of the city, including 773 on the Dal Lake.” For the next quarter of a century, the Valley did not record major floods in the valley, largely thanks to lessons learnt and reparative measures which were put in place. However, in 1929, the Valley grappled with yet another major flood, which mainly affected parts of what is today Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
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