Why can’t we store flood water in small dams?

BY:Amanullah Khan

ACCORDING to latest number of casualties due to monsoon floods about 371 people were killed and nearly 4.5 million were displaced or dislocated. This is not the first time when Pakistan facing floods, since past two years Pakistan has suffered devastating floods, including the worst in its history in 2010, when catastrophic inundations across the country killed almost 1,800 people and affected 21 million. As in 2010 and 2011, most of those hit by the latest floods are in Sindh province, where the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said 2.8 million were affected, with nearly 890,000 in Punjab and 700,000 in Baluchistan. Successive floods in the country had also major negative impact on national economy. Every year Pakistan’s economy is considered to have suffered a 0.5 per cent loss to the estimated growth rate. Flash floods that hit most of Sindh and parts of Baluchistan last year caused a loss of Rs324 billion to the economy. It is estimated that about 9.6 million people had been affected directly or indirectly and the sectors hit hard were irrigation and flood management, housing, agriculture, livestock & fisheries, transport & communications, energy, social & gender financial, private sector and industries, education, health, water supply & sanitation, governance, environment, disaster risk management and social protection. Keeping in view the ongoing disastrous situation, the affected areas and people need immediate and long-lasting mitigation measures to avoid future economic impacts and loss of life and property. Disaster mitigation refers to measures which can be taken to minimize the destructive and disruptive effects of hazards, and thus lessen the magnitude of a disaster. Mitigation is an activity that can take place at any time before, during, or after a disaster. Mitigation measures can range from physical measures such as flood defenses, safe building designs and establishment and maintenance of storm and wastewater drains to legislation, training, and public awareness. However, in the case of Pakistan, despite knowing the fact that floods had negative impact on the economic growth, every year government planned a disaster preparedness action plan, a disaster response plan, a disaster reconstruction and a rehabilitation plan, and a disaster mitigation plan. The plan identifies priority items and activities, delineates responsibilities, and stipulates time frame including periods for monitoring and evaluation. The absence of an institutional accountability, however, has resulted in poor quality monitoring and consequently in minimal knowledge about disasters. The crux of the problem lies also in the central government and their unwillingness to recognize local governments and local community groups and its failure to tie in disaster mitigation efforts with the ongoing debate on decentralization. Along this, policy makers, donors, and relief and development agencies treat flood disasters as isolated events that break the continuity of the ‘normal’ way of life. Most interventions to mitigate disasters are post hoc responses made under the assumption that an emergency support in the form of relief will help overcome the situation of hardship. Such support aims at restoring the situation to what it was before the disaster. Even when a flood disaster affects the same community every year, government, donor, and non-government organizations respond by providing the same relief and rehabilitation measures each time. Relief is the dominant approach championed by the regions’ governments, minion of the state, including international agencies and donor agencies. This approach does not consider the situation of a society during normal times between the occurrences of two hazard events important. Disasters are considered as a coincidence when a hazard interferes with society. Many times the terms “natural hazard” and “natural disaster” are used interchangeably. Despite the fact that flood disasters are widespread and frequent, efforts in Pakistan at creating a suitable set of institutions to deal with the associated consequences have been hamstrung by the lack of resources. Its government-centric approach ignored local governments and community based institutions. Even more problematic is the notion that each flood disaster is an isolated event and that post-disaster relief is the only logical response. Disaster is still considered an act of God that strikes once in one location, not something that could happen again and again. Flood disaster mitigation also involves large commitment of financial resources that could otherwise be spent on mainstream development effort. Disaster preparedness would imply making adequate initial investments in acquiring a better, more scientific understanding of the causes of natural hazards and a parallel effort in improving institutions and infrastructure necessary to confront them. It also means increasing the role and involvement of social institutions that range from local governments to non-governmental actors at the regional and the state levels. A major problem is the actual response to flood mitigation, which, conventionally is perceived as the responsibility of the government. There are separate agencies to work on different aspects of floods, ranging from hydrology to relief and rehabilitation, but they are ineffective. There is a conspicuous absence of flood disaster management plans. Even multi-sectoral approaches have had little co-ordination and thereby have been of limited value in mitigating hardships caused by flooding. The co-operation of the nongovernmental sector is critical and should also be solicited to identify factors that exacerbate societal vulnerability, which may vary in type and intensity from one area to another. The fact is that it is not the natural risk of floods, which is always present, but institutional failure, which exacerbates vulnerability. Institutions are conceived to include rules, regulations, practices, laws and organizations of both formal and informal types. Marginal community groups are not able to cope with a flood that face immense suffering. Outbreaks of epidemics, which often follow floods, make the situation worse. The resulting social trauma makes the distress difficult to remedy by only providing relief. The conventional responses to mitigating flooding are of two types. The first response takes the form of post event relief and the second is structural solutions in the form of multipurpose projects and embankments. In all over the world, large and small dams not only protected the countries but also provided them with cheap electricity through which they ran their industries smoothly. It is disappointing that Pakistan is an agricultural country but importing agro-based item from Saudi Arabia due to Pakistan’s failure in handling floods. Flood policy in Pakistan has been somewhat of a peripheral area for Pakistani water managers and then, it has also been limited to concerns with physical risk and exposure reduction. On the physical risk-management side, the priority for dam and barrage management has always been irrigation and power generation, and then flood control as an afterthought. There is an urgent need for Pakistani water managers to be trained to do multi-criteria management of the system, where long-term flood management is a priority on par with other priorities. The managers, if trained and given the autonomy, could operate infrastructure in such a way as to periodically flush channels and reduce the need for costly levee-breaching during flood events.