8
HERE we go again. Another monsoon season starts and in its very opening rains, Chitral district is devastated, an embankment near Alipur in southern Punjab is breached and large parts of Layyah are also inundated. Meanwhile, the same areas in Lahore and Pindi that get flooded every year are once again under knee-deep water.
One thing is different this year though. The district administration in parts of Punjab and KP, as well as the provincial disaster management authorities are working a lot faster to fashion a response. But the one big lesson has still not been learned regarding floods — that much of the work for preparedness has to be done long before the floods actually come.
Consider this. The flooding in Chitral district has been caused by two factors: heavy rains and what the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) of KP is calling a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF).
The first heavy downpour began on July 16 and continued for at least five days. Yet the Met office did not even see these rains coming. The glacial lake burst appears to have happened on the night of the 15th, and again on the 19th.
One big lesson has still not been learned — that much of the work for preparedness has to be done long before the floods actually come.
Now look at how two institutions looking specifically at these phenomena — rains and glacial lake outbursts — contributed to the level of preparedness for the floods.
The first advisory immediately preceding the rains came on July 14, 48 hours prior to their commencement and well within the forecast period of the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD). It warned of “widespread rain-thundershowers in Kashmir, Islamabad, upper Punjab (Gujranwala, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Sargodha, Faisalabad, Sahiwal divisions), Malakand, Mardan, Hazara, Kohat and Peshawar divisions from Friday to Tuesday, while scattered rain-thundershowers in Multan, D.G. Khan, Bahawalpur, D.I. Khan, Bannu divisions, Fata, north-eastern Balochistan (Sibi, Zhob, Kalat, Nasirabad divisions) and Gilgit-Baltistan during Saturday to Tuesday. Isolated rain-thundershowers are also expected in Sindh (Sukkur, Larkana, Mirpurkhas divisions) during Sunday to Tuesday.”
Notice: no mention of Chitral.
At the bottom of this advisory, issued 48 hours before the five-day long spell of intense rainfall began over Chitral, a small line reads: “monsoon heavy falls may generate flash flooding in the local streams, ravines and nullahs of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab during Saturday to Tuesday.”
That’s the closest thing we had to an alert, 48 hours before the event, that devastating rains were about to wash away homes and infrastructure in an entire district covering almost 15,000 square kilometres. No wonder none of the disaster management agencies forwarded the alert to district management groups.
Next, consider the glacial lake burst that is being given as another reason why the flooding in Chitral was so intense. Since 2011, the climate change ministry has been running a project with UNDP called the Pakistan GLOF Project. It concluded in April 2015 at a reported cost of $7.6 million.
The project aims, according to the same brief, are “[t]o develop the human and technical capacity of public institutions to understand and address immediate glacial lake outburst floods risks for vulnerable communities in northern Pakistan. The project will also enable vulnerable local communities in northern Pakistan to better understand and respond to glacial lake outburst floods risks”.
Amongst the expected results for the project is “[r]educed human and material losses in vulnerable communities in the northern areas of Pakistan through glacial lake outburst floods early warnings and other adaptation measures”.
The project aimed to do many things, including setting up two observatory stations, one in Chitral and one in Gilgit-Baltistan, to manage a particular community at severe risk of a GLOF event. In Chitral they set up in Bindo Gol valley, which has experienced numerous GLOF events since at least the early 20th century, with the last ones being in 1999, 2008 and 2010. Parts of the valley were washed away in each case.
Now comes the time to ask how much this project managed to accomplish. It is not yet known where exactly in Chitral the GLOF events occurred on the nights of July 15 and 19. Typically, a GLOF event would not release enough water to inundate an entire district. This is why I’m inclined to believe that the largest share of the flooding was contributed to by the rains, with a few GLOF events contributing to the overall inundation.
In either case, in almost exactly three months since its conclusion, the UNDP project appears to have faced its first large moment of truth. If the early warning systems and the floodwater diversion plans they laid down actually worked, then perhaps this event is a reminder of the importance, and viability, of advance warning in natural disasters.
The good folks of Bindo Gol valley should be able to tell us, as soon as communications can be re-established with the valley.
But what needs a bigger explanation is the total failure of the PMD to forecast the downpour, even as it was busy issuing flash flood forecasts for the Sulaiman Range, and elevated river flows elsewhere in the country. In April as well, when an unusual cyclone had hit Peshawar and the PMD had failed to issue any kind of a forecast, the department simply wiped its hands off the matter and stated its inability to forecast unusual weather events. It was a pathetic moment, but rest assured, there’ll be many more.
In its report on that cyclone the KP PDMA said “it is an open fact that our province seriously lacks weather forecasting capabilities. Presently, there is no operational weather radars installed throughout Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and even some districts have no weather observatories”.
In this era of dangerous climate patterns, lacking proper forecasting technique and technology is tantamount to leaving the city gates unguarded as hostile armies gather outside. It’s time to start taking weather more seriously.
The writer is a member of staff.
Twitter: @khurramhusain
Published in Dawn, July 23rd, 2015
On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play
