• Relief work suffers in absence of senior Rescue 1122, municipal authorities
• PMD officials rebuff administration’s claims of ‘cloudburst’
• Many areas remain without power for over 30 hours

HYDERABAD: When those charged with keeping the city dry cannot even keep their own offices from being flooded, how can they be expected to ensure proper drainage for the rest of the city?

This was the question many citizens seemed to be asking themselves on Tuesday, in the aftermath of a deluge that left many parts of the city inundated and virtually paralysed.

On Monday, the second most populous city in Sindh witnessed a total collapse of all utility services, including electricity and water, for up to 30 hours.

Rainwater finally started receding from settlements, roads and streets by late Tuesday night.

Mayor Kashif Shoro said claimed that 99pc areas of Hyderabad city had been cleared of rainwater.

He told Dawn on Tuesday evening that only 1pc areas were those pockets of low lying areas where water was being collected for disposal as it could not be drained out in mainstream drainage system.

Absent officials

During and in the aftermath of the deluge, Rescue 1122 personnel remained inactive for want of supervision by relevant officials, who were also missing from the scene. Resultantly, hundreds of thousands of people kept waiting for relief work until late in the night.

The divisional commissioner, a BS-20 officer, was also conspicuous by his absence at such a critical juncture.

Even on Tuesday, rainwater remained accumulated in Commissioner House as well as Shahbaz Building – where administration officers sit to discharge their duties – which speaks volume of the performance of both divisional and district administrations.

Cloudburst or no?

The head of the civil administration – the local deputy commissioner – attributed the crisis to ‘severe cloudburst’ in Hyderabad, only to be met with a strong rebuttal from the chief meteorologist, in addition to flak from social media users.

“It was in no way a cloudburst either by definition or by phenomenon”, Amir Hyder Leghari of Pakistan Meteorological Department Sindh told Dawn.

Rainwater from most part of city, rather old city areas, is drained on a gravity based system comprising a series of nullahs into two Phuleli canals unlike Latifabad where rainwater is pumped for disposal. These drains have not been desilted.

Power situation

Ironically, the Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (HMC) blames the Hyderabad Electric Supply Company (Hesco) for its failure to ensure uninterrupted power supply. However, the Hesco chief holds weather responsible for the collapse of its system.

In many areas power supply, could not be restored even 30 hours after it was suspended at about 4:20pm on Monday.

Hesco’s role, undoubtedly, is critical in every monsoon season, and even this time around, a considerable part of Hyderabad remained without power after trees fell on its feeders at different places following a powerful dust storm. No one from the HMC, administration or Hesco had bothered to trim the trees ahead of monsoon.

On its part, Hesco claimed on Tuesday evening that “100pc power supply has been restored in the city”, adding that six grid stations still remained offline.

According to Hesco’s spokesman Sadiq Kubar, said that 12 towers had fallen down during the dust storm and rainfall.

Published in Dawn, July 16th, 2025