Three drown as house falls into Gujjar Nullah

Vibration from KMC’s heavy machinery caused the incident, claim residents

KARACHI: Shaheena left her three-year-old granddaughter, Heera, at home sleeping before going for work. When she returned, Heera had drowned in Gujjar Nullah along with other family members.

Around three people drowned in the storm water drain, which flows from North Karachi’s Sector 11-J to Lyari River, when a 10-room, two-storey house collapsed. The incident took place apparently when the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation’s (KMC) heavy machinery was cleaning it off the trash at the point of Samnabad, some 30 to 40 kilometres away from the incident site.

The body of one resident, identified as Shehnaz, was recovered whereas efforts were underway to rescue the other two bodies as well.

Sitting at one end of the extremely narrow street of KBR Society, a remorseful Shaheena couldn’t stop crying. She remarked that if she had taken her ‘Heera’ to work with her, she would have been alive.

The family shifted in one of the rooms of the house about six months back and paid Rs5,000 as rent, said Shaheena.



As soon as Dilawar heard of the incident he rushed back to his house and found his mother, brother and sister injured. “Our hard-earned money wrapped in a piece of cloth, along with some jewellery for my sister is also lost inside the nullah,” he said with a puzzled look on his face. “We had a television and a fridge in our house, and now we have nothing.”

According to Dilawar, KMC’s machinery was cleaning the nullah a little further from their home, due to which their house collapsed. He said that a day earlier, they were asked by the KMC to vacate the place within 48 hours and then this happened.

KMC denies allegations

Meanwhile, the KMC’s municipal services senior director Masood Alam denied all such allegations. The machinery, according to him, was quiet far from where the incident took place. He said that the house was basically inside the nullah due to which it collapsed.

District Central deputy commissioner Captain (retd) Fariduddin Mustafa also said that the allegations are completely baseless. He pointed out that the residents were asked to vacate the houses in the next 48 hours as de-silting of the nullah was underway. According to him, the two-story house was built by some retired lance naik of the army, whom they are currently trying to locate.

Whom to blame?

Speaking about the incident, NED University architecture and planning department chairperson Dr Noman Ahmed said that it was possible that due to the vibration of the machinery, which was cleaning the nullah, the house could have collapsed.

According to him, houses built at the banks of rivers are basically encroachments and are built by petty labourers, without considering technical specifications.

Offering another explanation, he said it is possible that the house fell due to the increase in water pressure flowing beneath the house after the machinery cleaned the nullah.

Channelisation of nullah

According to Alam, the actual width of Gujjar Nullah is 200 feet, which at different spots have been reduced to 30 to 35 feet due to encroachments. Last year, KMC had announced its channelisation.

In its first phase, the survey of Gujjar Nullah was conducted by a joint team of engineers and officers of the KMC and the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board.

The 200-foot-wide nullah and 24-foot-wide road were proposed to be constructed on both the sides of the 14-kilometre long drain at an estimated cost of Rs5.5 billion and nearly 30,000 houses on the edges of the drain were supposed to be  resettled at an estimated Rs12.5billion.

However, like majority projects of the Sindh government this project also remained confined to the files. According to Alam it was not an easy project. “Several political issues sprung up when you try to demolish or resettle such encroachments in the city,” he said, adding that all the 30 nullahs of the city which fall under the KMC are heavily encroached.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 15^th, 2016.