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Is Pakistan prepared for a ‘Katrina’? FOR those in positions that matter who believe that catastrophic natural disasters will not happen in their lifetime or that even if they happen, nothing can be done about them, Katrina hurricane and the earlier Indian Ocean tsunami ought to shake them out of inertia. Both will go down in history as unprecedented natural disasters which caused devastating damage in terms of lives and property, with entire cities and towns being practically wiped out. Ironically, reduction of natural disasters has been on the UN agenda for nearly two decades. In the wake of El Nino (1987- 88), the UN in December 1987 had declared the 1990s as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. An Inter-Agency task force for disaster reduction was set up; an International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards was created. In May 1994, the first World Conference on Natural Disasters was held in Yokohama, Japan. The second such conference was supposed to have taken place before 2000 but it was not convened until January 2005, three weeks after the tsunami tragedy. Although both the tsunami and Katrina could not have been prevented, many believe the extent of loss and suffering could have been reduced. The disaster which Katrina brought on New Orleans was as much man-made as it was natural. Firstly, the local and state authorities failed to help tens of thousands of people who could not evacuate themselves before the city flooded. The authorities had ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city when it was threatened with inundation from the adjoining lake and river after Katrina had hit, and a mass evacuation plan apparently existed on paper to move people out in such circumstances. But the authorities failed to put the plan into operation. Secondly, despite all the assurances by American disaster planners about pre-planning to handle any emergency, federal disaster management agencies were clearly indecisive and unprepared to deal with and provide prompt emergency services to the tens of thousands of people who were stranded in New Orleans when the city submerged. In the case of the tsunami in December 2004, blame for the staggering 300,000 death toll has been pointed at the lack of a proper communications protocol or mechanism in place for the US scientists at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre based in Hawaii to sound the alarm when they had suspected a potential killer and issue a warning to the populations in harm’s way in some 27 disparate countries around the Indian Ocean. In any case, a tsunami warning whether communicated to individual governments or broadcast through the international media would have been effective only if the countries had mass evacuation plans at hand. In Katrina and the tsunami lie an important lesson for every government, not least of all Islamabad: any country or area is disaster prone to natural hazards, but the latter can be prevented from becoming full-scale natural disasters if there were effective alarm or warning-cum-evacuation systems and efficient relief operations. Pakistan is no stranger to natural hazards. Not a single province or area in the country has been spared from ravaging floods this year, with hundreds of villages affected and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. According to a review report entitled “Disaster Management Policies and Systems in Pakistan”, which was prepared for the second World Conference on Natural Disasters in January 2005, 6,037 people were killed and 8,989,631 affected by natural disasters in this country between 1993 and 2002. Much of the disaster management efforts here though, have revolved around flood disasters in the relatively less populated rural and mountainous areas. How prepared exactly are we to deal with a major catastrophic disaster in the heavily populated cities? Worst case scenarios could include a major earthquake or flash flood affecting Islamabad-Rawalpindi or Lahore, and a catastrophic cyclone or tsunami hitting Karachi, with multiple critical systems failing or breaking down, including roads, airports, water supply, communications and electricity. As Katrina and the tsunami have proved, such worst case scenarios can happen anytime, anywhere. Some efforts have been made in recent years to improve and strengthen our disaster response and management system. For example, an Emergency Services Ordinance was introduced in 2002 to establish an emergency service to deal with any public threatening emergency whether natural or man-made. The emergency relief cell in the Cabinet Division, which coordinates with provincial relief departments, was renamed as the National Disaster Management Agency under a reform sponsored by the UNDP. But according to the above report, there are several glaring deficiencies in our disaster management policy at the federal level. For one thing, the report says that within disaster management bodies, there is a dearth of knowledge and information about hazard identification, risk assessment and management, and linkages between livelihood and disaster preparedness. There are also no inclusive and coherent institutional arrangements to address disaster issues with a long term vision. Disaster management, development planning and environmental management institutions operate in isolation, with integrated planning between these sectors almost lacking. Thus, the report adds, some of the large-scale development projects are resulting in new forms of disaster and adding to the vulnerability of at-risk communities. The report cites the Left Bank Outfall Drainage project in Sindh and the country’s link canals as significant examples. If one may add, the proposed New Murree project is clearly another example of an impending disaster possibly affecting the Islamabad-Rawalpindi region, being viewed in isolation from the process of mainstream development. The second major deficiency, according to the report, is that disaster and relief departments and organizations remain under-resourced, untrained and are not given the required importance within the administrative hierarchy. It also says that a dedicated fund for disaster management at the federal level has never been a part of the overall development planning. The sooner these deficiencies are taken up and corrected, the better. Regardless of the frequency of a natural hazard or the available warning time, foresighted planning and preparedness for the mitigation of the effects of the natural hazards is the only way to reduce casualties and sufferings. Such emergency plans should not only look good on paper, but be workable on the ground as well.
