Mosque roof collapse

There is little or no oversight, such building regulations there are, imperfectly enforced if at all & widely flouted

The tragic collapse of the roof of a mosque in the Daroghawala area of Lahore on September 10 has taken the lives of at least 24 and injured another nine. The DCO Lahore has said that there are no more dead to be found under the rubble, and Pakistan adds yet another incident in which suspect construction standards lead to fatal accidents. The mosque was built in a congested area, with narrow lanes and encroachments making it difficult for rescue services to get to the scene. Although it is too early to say it is possible, as in with many other structures in recent days, that torrential monsoon rains had weakened it. Coupled with possible sub-standard building materials and methods this adds up to a recipe for disaster.

There is a national epidemic of building collapses. Many of them fail to make the headlines and it is only when there are large numbers of casualties that they gain any prominence. The numbers of collapses are certain to grow as badly made buildings thirty or forty years old (but some much younger than that) reach the end of their structural integrity and simply fall down. There is little or no oversight, such building regulations as there are, are imperfectly enforced if at all and widely flouted. Additional storeys are built atop approved structures, stressing the floors below beyond their designed load-bearing capacity. New structures are erected in areas — such as the one in which the Daroghawala mosque was situated — that are completely unsuitable and present a danger not just to those who use the unsafe buildings, but to anybody who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when they cave in. Memories tend to be short — a factory collapsed in Lahore in 2012 killing 16 women and four children. Poor construction blamed. The Margalla Towers apartment tower fell in the 2005 earthquake killing 78. Again faulty construction was to blame. There will be more. President Mamnoon expressed his condolences; he would have done better to call for better standards of building nationally.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 12^th, 2014.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.