IT was a difficult week for Karachiites. The monsoon had begun to take its toll on them. The month of July in 1967 set in with gloom in the horizon and lots of rain coming down ferociously on the Sindh capital. It all started in the first two days of the month with a steaming hot weather followed by half an inch of rain. But on July 3, things went haywire as heavy rains accompanied by a windstorm lashed the city. About 1,800 telephones went dead (which was a big deal at the time) and several dozen localities plunged into utter darkness. The 62-mile per hour wind uprooted trees, snapped cable wires and the electricity and telephone looked like bent utensils as if they had confronted Neo (from the film The Matrix).

More harm was done on the outskirts of Karachi because electricity and telephone cables could not withstand the velocity with which the wind blew. In the older part of the metropolis, the damage was largely caused due to the fallen trees. However, no major dislocation in underground cables and high-tension wires was reported. Sadly, rains were preceded by an oppressively hot and sticky weather which had already claimed one life while six patients of hyper-pyrexia, including a 78-year-od woman, were admitted to the Civil Hospital Karachi.

Now, all of this happened on a day when the maintenance staff of the Karachi Electric Supply Corporation (now KE) was busy repairing cables broken by the downpour a day earlier.

Those who were expecting that the weather might relent overnight were mistaken. On July 4, it rained for the third day on the trot — fourth time in six days — prompting weather experts to forecast “chances of a thunderstorm, shower evening, night”. Rains haunted the city intermittently from 2pm onwards, by 11pm recording one inch of the total rainfall. This meant that in the last six days, Karachi’s was covered in 3.75 inches of rainwater. Once again, just when the infrastructure was getting back to normal, the monsoon upset electricity supply, the telephone system, the railway signaling system and damaged the roads. The storm, which gathered the maximum wind velocity of 55 miles per hours, undid much of the repairs made by the afternoon of July 3.

The inclement weather raised questions about the effectiveness of the Met department and its capacity to foretell weather conditions. As a result, the department took some drastic measures and claimed on July 7 that the weather surveillance radar had been placed in the city to improve forecasting service. As per details, a radar ‘antenna’ weighing about two tons had been fixed on top of a 720-foot steel tower. The radar could scan an area of about 225 nautical miles. It was capable of detecting a heavy rainfall, large cloud formations, cyclones and frontal weather systems. Equipped with the largest devices to photograph and study various types of echoes received by it, the radar worked on a 5cm wavelength. Interesting, isn’t it? Because given that the Met department, to date, finds it difficult to accurately forecast things, the setup could have been a ploy to assuage people’s concerns.

But then Karachiites are an understanding lot, well, at least the Karachiites of the 1960s were. When it comes to relief work, they are always ready to lend a helping hand to the ones who need help. In those days the Arab-Israel war was a huge global issue. The directorate of social welfare in the province had formed an Arab Relief Fund to which people from all neighbourhoods of Karachi were donating. On July 8, it was announced that Lyari collected the largest amount of donations for the Fund at the Arab Relief Centre in the locality. The centre, which had been operating in Lyarai for the previous 25 days, had so far collected more than Rs3,000, besides a big number of donations in kind, including clothes, blankets, quilts and unstitched cloth. The collections had been mainly made through door-to-door visits by social welfare organisers and members of the council that ran the community centre.

Published in Dawn, July 3rd, 2017