KARACHI CHRONICLE: Building blunders

Qasr-i-Ruqayya, a five storey building with 18 apartments, in Lyari collapsed like a house of cards. Some apartment dwellers were lucky to escape, some lost atleast one or two members of their family identified in most cases to be women and little children, and some lost their entire family. The death toll seems small with 21 dead but that is because the breadwinners were out of the home when the building collapsed.
Why did it happen? Most experts blame the bad plumbing that water seeped though leaky pipes and weakened the structure. People think this is a problem that only exists in the poorly built houses and buildings in areas such as Lyari and other rundown places especially in the old city, especially Saddar Town.
But take a walk through the city and one of the most obvious signs of poor building is evident on the outer wall of high-rise apartments, festooned with black slime oozing from the gutters. Go inside any building and you will see tell-tale signs of seepage on the ceilings and inner walls. The buildings could be in the posh Defence and Clifton or rundown Ranchore Line. They may be fifty-year old or about five years old. They may be expensive apartments or rat holes in which the poor live.
A majority of buildings in the old city are dangerously weak, but people continue to live in them until they collapse. When you look at the poor plumbing all over the city you wonder what is the criteria for declaring that a building is dangerous. Surely the newer buildings in Defence and Clifton, which are not older that 20 or 25 years and appear to be well made, except for the plumbing problem, could be Qasr-i-Ruqayya waiting to happen.
Does anybody know what kind of material was used? Take the concrete block; who inspected them before they were used to build? It is a well known fact that the cement-to-sand ration that will ensure sturdy blocks is not, never, maintained. The block-makers use more sand than cement. I have myself kicked some blocks at a construction site of a high-rise building near the Seawall. It crumbled. In Defence View you cannot drive a nail in the wall for fear that great clumps of the wall will simply fall off.
The trend in building is to conceal wiring and plumbing pipes within the walls and ceilings. There is no guarantee that good quality material was used. The contractor may say he used A-grade material but only a fool would belive him. If he had, there would not be so many cases of short circuit and leaking pipes.
But these problems also exist in buildings which were supervised strictly and the best material was indeed used in the construction. The reason is that the workmen do not know their job too well. The best of them have gone off to the Middle East; what we have in Karachi are semi-skilled workmen or outright amateurs. Making a joke of the situation comedian Omar Sharif once said since the buildings in Defence and Clifton are crooked the people who live in them are crooked (crooks) too. Crooked buildings are a fact. Buildings, especially those in the commercial areas of these posh societies are crooked. Even the one I am living in. We dropped a plumb line from the roof to test and sure enough the building is out of plumb by six inches.
But we are fortunate. There is another building nearby in which from time to time a vicious crack running from top to bottom appears which the owners of the building quickly cover up. Recently the empty plots on either side of this dangerous building have been built and the building now comfortably hides its flaw, but Heaven help if it should suddenly collapse. And this is in Defence Housing Authority where they are supposed to be very strict about building regulations.
They were strict in the beginning when the Authority was established but soon greed caught up and now there is no guarantee that a house or apartment in DHA will be according to building regulation. In commercial areas ground plus three storeys is allowed but today only a few old commercial area building have this. Today there will be a basement, a mezzanine floor and atleast four more floors.
Another factor which could be the cause of poor construction is that like the buildings in poor or poorer areas the commercial area buildings in DHA and Clifton did not have the benefit of an architect or civil engineer. A sort of standard blueprint is used since the space usage is the same. At best a contractor superficially supervises the entire process of construction from the excavation of the foundation to the fittings and fixtures.
So why blame the people of Lyari for living in sub-standard buildings? What the city needs is more than building regulations. It needs professionals handling every stage of the construction. It needs accountability such as insurance cover, right from the start.
Last but not least is the continuously rising cost of building material. One simply cannot budget for a building. The price of cement goes up almost as if it was a fast growing vine. Cost cutting then becomes the norm.