THE National Assembly was informed recently in a session of parliament that Pakistan may face super floods this summer.

The most vulnerable to this calamity will be the people living in the Katcha areas of Sindh. Hopefully, with the recent advances in science and in weather prediction and satellite imagery, the civilian population should receive timely warning and move to higher ground for safety. It will be the age old infrastructure that will face the brunt of the raging waters.

One of them is Sukkur barrage. It was designed and built in 1922, and had the capacity to handle 1.5 million cusecs. After more than nine decades, the barrage starts to overflow beyond 700,000 cusecs. Anything beyond can seriously damage the biggest barrage in Pakistan. The reason for this is massive silting upstream. Eight gates out of its 66 are inoperable owing to silting, especially on the Sukkur side of the barrage. The silt has created islands in the river just before the barrage.

During the 2010 super floods, a CNN documentary shot from a helicopter showed the Indus river’s width at 40 kilometres at its head, while just upstream of passing through Sukkur barrage it is only a kilometre wide.

A serious effort to initiate intense dredging is required not only at Sukkur barrage but of other important barrages like Guddu, Punjnad, Chashma, Taunsa and Ghulam Mohammad.

Desilting was a regular practice in Sukkur barrage till 1984 after which it became irregular. Hence the threat.

S. Nayyar Iqbal Raza
Karachi

Published in Dawn, April 16th, 2019