June 12, 2007	Tuesday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 26, 1428

LAKKI MARWAT, June 11: People of the Lakki Marwat district have been enduring a severe heatwave for the past two days with the mercury rising consistently each day. Markets, business centres, streets, lanes and roads present a deserted look at 11 o’clock since most shopkeepers, vendors and people prefer to stay at home due to the scorching heat. Traffic too remains thin.

Although, state-run schools have closed down for summer vacation that started on June 1, students of private institutions are still awaiting their turn. An unusual rush of patients can be seen at hospitals and private clinics in this sizzling heat.

Local people prefer to seek treatment at private clinics due to a token strike being observed by doctors at public hospitals after the kidnapping incident involving two senior medical officers a couple of weeks back.

“Doctors usually reach hospitals at 10 o’clock. Then they join their colleagues to observe the strike for one and a half hour,” a patient suffering from exhaustion and sunburns said, adding: “At the end of the strike, doctors leave the hospitals as their official duty hours also end by that time”.

Hot winds and hours-long power breakdowns have also made the lives of the people miserable.

The constant load-shedding has created water shortage in the area since tubewells cannot function without electricity. Local people are increasingly finding it difficult to find potable water.

In fact, the inhabitants of the district have been facing electricity shortage for the last couple of years and in spite of the promises made by local politicians and elected representatives, no concrete steps have been taken in this connection so far.

Last year, the then District Coordination Officer Kifayatullah Khan had approached the high ranking officials of the Peshawar Electricity Supply Company, which installed a 13MVA transformer in the 66KV Tajazai grid station that had solved the problems of voltage and load shedding in the area to a certain extent.

However, the truth of the empty promises made by the local politicians and elected representatives, including MPs and district nazim, could be gauged from the fact that work on mega projects such as upgradation of the Tajazai and Darra Pezu grid stations to 132 KV and establishment of a separate 132 KV grid station for Lakki city could not be launched so far. With electricity related problems compounding their miseries, local people here have no option but to bear the long summer of discontent.

MANSEHRA: The sizzling heat spell has brought more misery to quake survivors in Balakot and other adjoining areas as hundreds of families have been forced to flee their tents to take shelter in cooler areas.

The survivors in Balakot, which was devastated in the Oct 8, 2005 earthquake, were suffering as their shelters made of steel sheets and tents had become huge burning boxes. Hundreds of families were shifting to Kaghan, Narain and Mansehra to escape the heatwave.

There have been reports that some students studying at private schools in make-shift tents, including children, had fallen unconscious in the heat, but even then the administration of these schools did not announce the start of their summer vacation.

Ever since the declaration of Balakot as a red-zone, the Earthquake Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Authority (Erra) had imposed a ban on construction of concrete houses and shops in the area as a result of which people in Balakot and Garlat were still living in shelters made of steel sheets.

Perveen Akhtar, who lives in a shelter in Balakot, said that she had never before in her life experienced such simmering heat. “It seems that the shelter has been turned into a fire place where we are forced to bear the brunt of the heat," she said.

She said that most families living nearby had left their shelters for cooler places to save their children from the scorching heat.

Secretary-General Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal Balakot Haji Fazalur Rehman told Dawn that it was impossible to live in the makeshift structures. He blamed the government and the Erra for the problems of the people here and said that “if they had fulfilled their responsibilities on time, then the quake survivors might have been shifted to concrete houses earlier.”