KARACHI: Earlier this week, the new administrator of the Defence Housing Authority, Brig Maqsud Hussain, held a press conference at the Beach View Club in which he said the oil-stricken Karachi beach would be open to the public in two or three months. He added :”The DHA will not take the risk of opening the beach in a hurry until it is cleared of all environmental hazards and pollution caused by the leakage of the Tasman Spirit.”

In reality, the beach was opened two days after this statement. First, all the barriers were removed from the roads. Then on Friday, the Juma Bazar was held next to the beach. By Sunday, it was business as usual at Sea View as hundreds converged and spent their time there. The restaurants were open, everyone seemed to be having a good time, unmindful of the hazards the beach poses in its present form.

The only eye sore, if any, were the hundreds of white bags containing the oil contaminated soil, which have been scooped up by tractors from the beach front and lined next to a building on the beach’s main boulevard. These bags, whose number continues to increase, are a testament to the incompetence of the coordination committee set up to monitor the clean-up operations.

This committee, set up by General Musharraf and headed by Sindh Chief Secretary Mutawakkil Kazi, has been unable to coordinate between the various stakeholders in the clean-up operation. An example is the opening of the beach. On this, the committee had decided not to open the beach until a “complete safety certification is achieved”. This has not happened.

The other example of its incompetence is the manner in which the oil-soaked soil was to be disposed of. It was decided in August to move the debris to a location far away from the city to a designated landfill site near Surjani Town called Jam Chakro. At the time it was agreed that the discarded material would not be used for any useful purpose and would be disposed of in pits specially prepared by the Sindh Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA). With the clean-up operation nearing its conclusion, it has now transpired that over 1,000 bags are lying in the open at the landfill site and some hundred bags at Sea View. Neither have the pits been dug up, nor have they been prepared according to the specifications agreed. Residents of nearby areas have complained of chest pains and throat infections but so far nothing has been done. There have been protests by residents of the densely-populated Surjani Town, who say that their health is at risk.

The understanding was that SEPA would prepare the pits and line them with a special chemical so that they would not pose a health hazard. SEPA has not imported the required materials needed for lining the sites. To understand the workings of the bureaucratic mindset, one has to appreciate the comments of Sindh Environment Secretary Shujat Karni, who said he had stopped further collection of contaminated sand from the beach as the oil “would be washed by the sea”. Mr Karni is the head of an action committee that has been set up on top of the Qazi coordination committee to monitor progress of the clean up operation. No mention has been made by this senior official of what would be done about the oil-soaked bags in Jam Chakro and in Sea View that continue to pollute the air through noxious fumes and smell.

For its part, both the KPT and the PNSC have faded from the picture. There is no news about the “fast track inquiry” ordered by communications minister Ahmed Ali, or another inquiry that was to be put before the national assembly. With one sole exception, most of Karachi’s elected representatives in both the provincial and national assemblies have not bothered to take up the prickly questions that need to be answered. Why did the PNSC charter such an old carrier? What agreement did the PNSC enter into with the owners of the Tasman Spirit? Why was the Tasman Spirit delayed in its docking operations at the port which led to it being stranded in low tide? Did some other organization take the ship’s place at the port which caused the delay? Why did the KPT botch up the rescue efforts and then try to cover this up by insisting that nothing was wrong? Why did the relevant agencies, including the high flying environmental NGOs, take weeks to raise an alarm. The list of questions is endless. But answers are few and far between.

The expectations, however, from the most unexpected quarters are high. Officials believe that the oil-eating bacteria being developed at Karachi University and also the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission will be adequate for cleaning up the marine system. On that basis, there are now pronouncements from official quarters to let things be and not pursue more clean-up initiatives. This belief is not only misplaced, but also quite worrisome.

To get some idea of the kind of damage caused to the environment, it is understood that over 600 tons of marine life, living around 35 nautical miles of the epicentre of the spill, have perished. Contrary to the claims of Tariq Ikram, the head of the EPB, Pakistan’s fish exports have been affected by this spill. Thousands of fishermen have been affected so far.

Keeping all this in mind, one wonders whether the culture of covering up failures in handling disasters like the spillage caused by the Tasman Spirit, will ever change. While one official covers up for the other, the people of Karachi, and Pakistan, suffer the consequences of the disaster. For officialdom, all’s well that ends well.