Pakistan’s sprawling Karachi ‘broken’ by monsoon floods

by ASAD HASHIM & AYSHA IMTIAZ

Record rains inundated Pakistan’s largest city, paralysing city authorities as people were left to fend for themselves.

For Shahzad Ahmed, there was no time to think.

“The windows broke and the door caved in, that’s how intense the water pressure was,” he said of the first night of torrential monsoon rain in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, last week.

“We didn’t even try to take the water out of the house. I just tied my rickshaw [to a pole] as tightly as I could and my family and I [got on] the rooftop.”

Ahmed, his wife and children spent more than 10 hours on that roof, in the pouring rain, as Karachi saw more than 230mm of rainfall in less than 12 hours, the most ever recorded, according to the Pakistan Meteorological Department.

This year, Pakistan has seen some of the most intense monsoon rains in years, with more than 189 people killed and thousands of homes washed away in flooding across the country, according to the country’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) (PDF).

We used to have clean drinking water, but we haven’t had any since the rain started.

Azhar Abbas, a shopkeeper

Karachi, a sprawling metropolis of more than 20 million people, was one of the worst-hit by the urban flooding. Streets turned to rivers, as the sheer volume of water quickly overloaded the city’s dilapidated and ill-maintained drainage systems.

In Ahmed’s working-class neighbourhood of Yousuf Goth, a video taken after the rains showed water flowing through the streets, mixing with sewage and solid waste, as residents waded through it to salvage what they can from their homes.

“What we need most right now is clean drinking water and vegetables. You can’t make a meal out of oil or just packets [of dry food],” said Azhar Abbas, a shopkeeper in the same neighbourhood.

Muhammad Rashid, 29, a construction worker, said his family was trapped at home, but he had to wade through the sewage periodically to try and find drinking water.

“The only thing I left the house for was water,” he said. “We slept without food on the first night. We were safe on our roof, but I kept leaving in the five feet of water just to get [drinking] water.”

The city’s main thoroughfares did not cope much better, submerged under several feet of water, leaving cars stranded or washed away in the flow. Desperate residents took to contracting agricultural tractors to try and winch their vehicles out.

Electricity supply across the city failed, or was pre-emptively cut, almost immediately, as the city’s main utility company reported its substations were being flooded. The pre-emptive cuts were aimed at limiting deaths due to electrocution if exposed wires were to come into contact with water in the streets.

Right now, it’s like kicking a dead horse. They just don’t have the capacity for it.

Farhan Anwar, urban planner

At least six people died as a result of such electrocutions, hospital officials told Al Jazeera.

Ahmed said he had to take the risk to move his family after 48 hours spent on their rooftop without electricity, water or natural gas to cook with.

“I was worried about the [electricity] current in the waters, but when the choice is between certain death by starvation or possibly electrocution, what could I do?”

‘Governance system failure’

As the rains now begin to subside, the hard work of cleaning up the debris and rebuilding will begin. In a city as divided and administratively “broken” as Karachi, however, urban planners and researchers said that will be easier said than done.

“It is an overall governance system failure,” said Farhan Anwar, an urban planner and faculty member at Karachi’s Habib University. “You can’t isolate a particular cause for it [because] we have, over the years, allowed the city to develop and grow without planning or regulation or a framework.”

Anwar said the city was “on its knees” after the rains, and that its institutions, plagued by decades of mismanagement, a lack of planning and political contestation, simply do not have the capacity to deal with the situation.

Al Jazeera for more