Pakistan - Peshawar pummelled

In an event unprecedented for this time of the year, Peshawar had to brace itself on Sunday night when a massive storm came swooping in leaving death and destruction in its wake. Experts have called this freak occurrence a “mini-cyclone” and considering the toll it has taken on the provincial capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, that would be a fair description. As many as 35 people are reported to have died and 150 injured in winds that are said to have reached 110 kilometres an hour. The death count is slated to rise and the questions are also mounting why this was allowed to occur without any preparedness.

We are living in strange times. Weather patterns are changing. We should have been languishing in the initial flutterings of a hot summer but now we are witnessing high speed winds, unexpected storms, surprising rain showers and the like. It is becoming evident that we can no longer depend upon the seasons to help us prepare and handle climate trajectories. We now need year round preparedness and measures taken to effectively reduce the human toll changing weather patterns can exact. However, our disaster management authorities leave much to be desired. The provincial disaster management authorities issued warnings to the hapless citizens after the storm had caused most of the damage, what to say of evacuating the people. Trees came crashing down, billboards were swept away and power transmission lines were massively damaged, plunging many parts of the province into darkness for a number of hours. To add to this chaos, hospitals started to overflow with people who had been caught in the storm and, for some time on Sunday night, it felt as though the citizens of Peshawar had been left stranded.

Relief and rehabilitation efforts, spluttering to a start after the ordeal, are all well and good but something should have been done to issue a warning to the people who could have saved themselves; maybe we would have seen a lower death count. There are some basics that should have been looked at and ensured even if we were caught by surprise. Public drainage systems must be kept functional so that low lying areas do not have to confront the menace of being drowned in rain water, which subsequently attracts the dengue mosquito. Even now aftershocks and tremors from the earthquake that struck Nepal on Saturday are being felt in Peshawar and elsewhere in Pakistan. All this goes to show that nature’s capriciousness is increasing and all we can do is prepare for the worst. In Pakistan, we cannot seem to do even that.