| August 3, 2003 | Sunday | Jumadi-us-Sani 4, 1424 |
A tale of rains and traffic jams
THE Sialkot district government has redrawn the District Flood Disaster and Relief Plan keeping in view the experience of floods of 1997. Sialkot DCO Capt (Rtd) Zahid Saeed told Dawn that this integrated plan embraces all conceivable emergencies and serves as a guide for utilization of both the government and the people.
It is action-oriented and flexible and encourages self-reliance among district officials by furnishing information and training to them. While preparedness is the responsibility of the authorities, it is emphasized that morale and efficiency will be greatly determined by response and involvement of aid-giving agencies.
Every year Sialkot district has to face the onslaught of floods causing devastation and disruption of normal life. The situation sometimes aggravates due to excessive rains, flash floods in “Nullahs” and high floods in rivers. Remedial and relief action is accordingly designed to tackle the ravages of rain, hill torrents and rivers in flood, besides making an integrated plan to save lives and to protect installations, infrastructure, machinery and stocks (e.g. roads, railway track, bridges, power installations, gas pipelines, irrigation works & tubewells), besides providing guidance to the people engaged in preventive and control operations, outlining the rules for district authorities, government agencies and private organizations in any disaster situation, establishing operational structure and operational procedures and swift acquisition and dispersal of any information related to flood in order to initiate prompt action.
Strenuous efforts are being made to mobilize all human and material resources to preempt disaster and carry out relief work in an organized manner. A comprehensive Flood Disaster & Relief Plan” has been chalked out to save and protect the lives and properties of the people.
Features: Different regions of Sialkot district face danger from different sources. Rivers Chenab, Jammu and Tavi and Munaawar Tavi threaten Bajwat in the north. The area of south Marala Headworks, including some villages of Sambrial (Daska), is affected by the downstream discharge of River Chenab. Pasrur tehsil is mainly hit by flood in Deg Naullah.
Sialkot city is threatened by flood in Aik and Bhed Nullahs. These nullahs have not been cleaned or desilted by the local government since long.
Sialkot District Nazim Mian Naeem Javaid told Dawn that the entire Sialkot district has been divided into 17 sectors and 34 sub-sectors to meet flood emergency during this season. The relief sectors and sub-sectors are mostly situated at higher and safer places near flood-affected places and are utilized for storage of relief goods as well as to serve as shelter for the flood-hit people. These sites are connected with Kucha and Pucca roads and are easily accessible.
In order to effectively provide relief and rescue, each sector officer has been given a mobile team for vaccination of human beings as well as cattle.
The Board of Revenue has supplied only one country-made boat and the following items have been supplied by UNDP to Sialkot district for flood relief — four fibreglass boats, 15 dewatering sets, 18 life jackets, three mobile sets and five handy-talkies.
Some fibreglass boats fitted with engines are also available with the Pakistan Army, which can be deputed to assist civil authorities. These boats will also be used during flood emergency by military personnel. Two dewatering pumps are available with Sialkot Civil Defence. Sialkot Tehsil Municipal Administration (TMA) has 15 dewatering sets in proper working condition.
The district government has selected various points for providing relief during flood. Six disaster services (including rescue & evacuation service, health, transport, communication, security and relief & welfare services) will be set up at district and sub-divisional levels for use of implementing agencies.
HAVE any lessons at all been learnt from the suffocating and scary traffic jams (read also chaos and madness) that the Sindh capital has experienced, and which Karachiites have suffered in the monsoon season this year? That season is still on, one may add. Can, in fact, any lessons be learnt from the trauma that they braved through? Men, women and children were trapped in traffic jams all over the city, some of them almost all night.
Try and imagine the scare, the horror. Is there a will, an awareness, and are there available the resources and the competence (read integrity also) to combat the challenge that is likely to surface every time it rains? People obviously seek to go home. Should not they go home?
One does not attempt to try and answer these questions. It is more pertinent to focus on days and nights like the one Karachi underwent on Monday last (July 28) primarily because they could not move on the city’s roads as there were frustrating traffic jams that reflected the urban horror that Karachi can produce.
That traffic mess wasn’t just because of the traffic police and its inability to handle the volume of impatient, indisciplined drivers (private and public) who were on the roads in residential and commercial areas. It was evidently a situation that was created because the rain water was steadily and surely, accumulating on the roads, and that or rather all that talk and claim of being ready for the monsoon was bogus. The results have proved this. Haven’t they?
Monday’s experience was not just a terrible repeat of what the city faced on July 7 when there was perhaps the first major downpour of the season. Even that was a day that had drivers showing indiscipline, and impatience but this time on July 28 it was much worse. As if no lesson had been learnt from what had happened then, and somehow it seemed there was just no one in charge on the roads once the rains began.
Common sense makes one ask why was the rain water not flowing into the storm water drains. One does not want to go into the several negative interpretations that are being made. Newspapers report continue to reflect on the state of ties that still exist currently between the Sindh government and city district government.
As you analyse the traffic jams, say citizens, angry and vocal, are because of the state of the roads. Regardless of who built them and when they caved in, or developed potholes, or washed away altogether, the fact is that they have been a leading cause of the poor speed at which traffic now moves on the city roads. That is slow. Awfully and disgracefully slow, leading to paralysing traffic jams which has presently altered the complexion of things in many localities.
We are not referring to the way the rainwater stands to stink in almost all residential areas and one wonders who will clear this mess, and when. What will be the impact of this on the hygienic standards of the community? ask agitated housewives in Clifton and Defence. Interestingly and enigmatically even these and other posh areas of the city have now begun to suffer whenever rains fall. Gone are the times when only low-lying areas, or the backward areas of the city, were vulnerable to the monsoon season. Now the city as a whole seems to be hit by inefficiency and poor planning. What are we doing to Karachi in a context where the population is constantly rising? It is a scary thought.
Scores of vehicles were left overnight, in a state of hurried abandon, and the owners went home. When they returned the next day, roughing it out on the roads, once again there were different items missing from the vehicles reflecting upon the state of ethics of this society.
What would have happened had they spent the night in their cars? Many people did not reach their homes that night and spent the night either in their offices or the residences of nearest friends or relatives. Or they made some other arrangement.
I must mention here not just the fact that the Jinnah Hospital road is a scandalous mess once again, creating traffic nightmare at the Cantonment Station roundabout and the road that leads to it, but also the fact that in the panic that night, the FM radio station had a very significant programme on air. It was a live phone-in service where drivers of vehicles stranded anywhere in the city were phoning-in to tell their families and the public of what they were going through. Someone, for instance, was telling the FM-100 compere that he was on the Baloch Colony bridge for the last three hours, and that he had been on the roads for almost five hours, and was unsure of when would he reach home that night.
In fact, one feels that people have become so scared of traffic jams in the context of Karachi rains, that they have chosen or tried to become home-bound as soon as they have sensed that the light showers could turn into heavy rain. So it appears what began as a welcome monsoon season which Karachiites longed for as they suffered the heat waves of May and June, has perhaps turned into a nightmare, primarily because of the traffic jams.
Power failures and other handicaps that we live with are other factors that one has not focused on deliberately. This traffic problem is something that deserves to be attached highest priority, said a senior citizen. See what the spokesman of the Edhi foundation said on Thursday: Patients died or suffered as ambulances were held up in the traffic chaos in many areas. Heart patients and expectant mothers were particularly hard hit.
The rain has created an emergency in the city in other respects. There is no denying that, and citizens are somehow unsure of whether the right steps are being taken on time. One is referring to the story that appeared in Dawn on August 1 with headline: “City government meeting ends in a punch-up”. Earlier on Thursday afternoon another daily carried a banner which said that “Karachiites suffer while rulers fight”. Does it balance out when the city government announces that a 10 day-long cleanliness campaign is being launched in the city from August 4?
One has heard many one-liners on the rains and traffic jams while people have ruminated over the issue. One woman remarked that it seemed that Karachiites were fighting a battle for survival on July 28 and all because planning and preparation for the monsoon wasn’t foolproof. Was it foolproof? one wonders.