Too little - too late. That is how the disaster management capabilities of Pakistan can be summed up especially when it comes to flood prevention and mitigation. The country has seen its share of devastation, and the memory of the floods of 2010 still haunts the inhabitants of the northern parts of Pakistan, who bore the brunt of destruction.
The Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) has issued warnings for floods this time around too which it did back then as well. Flash floods have already started with 45 people losing their lives during the last ten days in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) alone. According to weather pundits, the monsoon is predicted to bring catastrophic torrential floods in the mountains of the Suleiman range with the chance of history repeating itself in the form of the 2010 disaster.
However, the real alarming news is that the PMD has acknowledged the failure of the countrys seven flood warning radars that are now useless when it comes flood forecasting and warning. The most recent one was installed in 2004 in Mangla, which speaks volumes about the seriousness of several regimes to tackle this crucial issue. Although KP has suffered more than its share from flood wreckage since 2010, it has been almost twenty years since any installation of a warning system for floods in the province.
Although the PMD has tried to procure funding of Rs7 billion project for up gradation of the obsolete warning and forecasting system, the government apparently views the lives and livelihood of millions as insignificant. The Planning Commission has refused to fund it on a war footing basis and instead proposes to provide multi-year financing to a project that is already decades late.
Apparently, there is also a Federal Flood Commission (FFC) housed under the Ministry of Water and Power (MOWP) that has the official mandate of developing measures for improvements in flood forecasting and warning systems and preparation of national flood action plans. The continued suffering of the people at the hands of a natural calamity, which can certainly be mitigated, bears testament to the incompetence of this institution to bring any measure of relief.
Peter Webster, a US based flood expert found out in a study published after the 2010 floods that if Pakistan had possessed quantitative precipitation forecasts, the high risk of flooding could have been foreseen. "It seems to me that you could have saved an enormous amount of property and probably a lot of lives with advance warning", Mr. Webster was quoted as saying. He has already established an early warning network in Bangladesh and has showed interest in working with Pakistan to develop an early warning system and sophisticated forecasting capabilities.
However, as past experience has shown, bureaucratic red tape and the apathy on behalf of successive governments have seen little development on that front at the expense of countless lives and billions of dollars in property damage. It is highly imperative that the institutions charged with disaster management be revamped as negligence and incompetence has prevailed far too long.
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