Flood In Pakistan

There are many questions emerging from the recent floods in Pakistan,
ranging from attempts to understand the atmospheric phenomena behind the
downpours to the search for where ultimate responsibility lies for the
ensuing human calamity. This short essay investigates some of those
questions.
A pinch of geography is necessary to explain why Pakistan received such an
extraordinary amount of rain during this rainy season. The Indian monsoon
can be understood as a giant sea-breeze, with ocean moisture sucked in by
rising hot air over the South Asian plains. It is influenced by large scale
weather patterns such as the jet stream in the northern hemisphere, which
this year came to a halt as a consequence of Rossby Waves, powerful
spinning wind currents created by the earth’s rotation. Such unusual
occurrences – called ‘blocking events’ – have taken place in the past, and
have resulted in unusual weather phenomena. This year, as the jet stream
became stationary, unusually hot summers led to the breakout of wildfires in
Western Russia, and unprecedented rains poured down the slopes of the
Western Himalayas. The blocking event coincided with the summer
monsoon, which brought unusually heavy amounts of rain on the mountains
that girdle the north of Pakistan.
The intensity of the localized rainfall was fantastic – four months worth of
rainfall had fallen in just a couple of days. Some areas in Northern Pakistan
received more than three times their annual rainfall in a matter of 36 hours.
Gushing quickly down the tributaries into the Indus River, the rainwaters
gave rise to floods of catastrophic proportions. Given the immensity of the
downpours, some flooding was inevitable. Yet rivers are essentially
channels to drain out water; being one of the largest rivers of the world, the
Indus should have been able to carry out the excess waters into the Arabian
Sea which it joins near Karachi. Why could the river not flush out the excess
waters? This is where human intervention – in terms of water resource
planning and infrastructure development – played an important role in the
floods.
In the last few decades, water and irrigation infrastructure within the Indus
system has increased in size and number. Indeed, over two thirds of the
Indus flow is now diverted for irrigation. A number of tributaries also join
the Indus from the west. These are fast-flowing hill torrents that bring down
huge quantities of silt during the monsoons (because the Himalayas is one of
the youngest mountain ranges in the world, rivers that originate there like the
Indus bring down enormous quantities of sediments in the form of sand, silt
and clay). With funding from the Asian Development Bank and the World
Bank, a series of barrages have been built along the hill slopes to prevent
their waters from reaching the Indus. When many of these barrages failed,
they added waters to the already inflated Indus and contributed to further
worsening of the flood situation.
Besides the frozen jet stream that caused the unusual rains, then, it is the
water infrastructure on the Indus River and its tributaries that are to blame
for the scale of human impact of the floods in Pakistan. One can safely say
that the floods were partly ‘anthropogenic’ in that they were caused by
careless planning of water resources. Engineers and water planners have
often given insufficient consideration to the sediment load that gets carried
within the banks of the river channel, and through the interventions of their
infrastructure they exacerbated this year’s flood. They created a false sense
of security amongst the rural peasants, whose lives and livelihoods were
washed away in the floods.
Water planning as it has been practised in Pakistan certainly carries benefits
for some segments of the rural communities, specifically those rich farmers
who own the farming lands. When key pieces of infrastructure such as
barrages fail, however, innumerable people’s lives can be plunged into utter
distress. The political ecology of the water infrastructure is such that those
who benefit from them are usually not those who suffer from the floods;
although the water resource planning is done in the name of improving the
lot of the poor, it is they who suffer most when the technology fails.
If something good can at all come out of the enormous human tragedy that
Pakistan has been confronted with, it should be a rethinking of river
development and planning not only in that country, but entire South Asia.
No one could have possibly predicted or prevented the floods. It was by all
measures an unusual natural event exacerbated by human folly in terms of
water resource planning and development. One can, however, certainly
ensure that the magnitude of its after-effects was within human ability to
deal with. Unfortunately the Pakistani government is poorly equipped to
deal with the human aftermath. This is where all of us as individuals can
play a role. We still have the time to help the flood-affected people, and
assist them to rebuild their lives.