Helpless in Houston

The pictures can never tell the whole story in a disaster as vast as that unfolding in Texas, US. A modern city of eight million people is mostly under water, tens of thousands are sheltering in sports stadia and conference halls. In a tiny corner of Facebook an old friend, her two children and her husband see their home flooded and they escape with the kids, what they can grab of the valuables — and not much else. President Trump has paid a visit and thus far has made a better fist of publicly handling the crisis than did his predecessor, President Bush, who was notably tin-eared about the effects of Hurricane Katrina. Thousands of volunteers, professional rescue workers and the US military have all mobilised into a rescue operation that could go on for days and why are we seeing it here described in far-off Pakistan?

Despite the increasingly well-coordinated operation and the spirit of self-help that characterises much of it, the richest country in the world with resources beyond compare is helpless in the face of the weather. A natural event — and no, there is not going to be a discussion here about global warming — has effectively taken offline America’s fourth-largest city. A major economic powerhouse is silent. The downtown towers have their basements flooded. There is no power. The a/c units and the lifts are silent. The commuter freeways under water. Twelve are reported dead so far but official sources are realistic about the possibility of many more being revealed as time passes; and trillions of dollars down the line in aid and reconstruction. Officials of the Federal Disaster Management Agency (Fema) are talking about years of recovery. It is possible that in terms of scale this is the largest natural disaster in America in modern times.

Now cast your mind back. The Sindh floods of 2011 that were the worst in provincial history. Those of us that fly can still see areas of standing water that are part of the legacy of the Great Flood. The province was crippled. Around 4.8 million people were directly affected and by mid-January 2012 a bit over 10 per cent of the province was still inundated. From my own observations parts of it are far from being recovered and I suspect never will be. There may well be places that are lost to habitation.

Now cast your mind forwards. What happened in Sindh in 2011-12 is going to happen again. There are going to be other extreme weather events in Pakistan and they are going to occur with increasing frequency. The helplessness referred to in Houston is not the helplessness of individuals, but the helplessness associated with vast events that are naturally occurring, many of them unpredictable and all of them incapable of being averted by human intervention. Pakistan is in the top 10 countries that are going to be negatively affected by global warming despite having a minuscule carbon footprint compared to all of the developed nations.

But Sindh and Texas are a false equivalence, apples and oranges so why bother with a comparison? In a word — preparedness. Houston and its environs may not have been prepared for the scale of the disaster, but they were prepared for the generality, the concept of disaster, and are now adapting what they have to suit an evolving problem.

The fear I have is that the colossal events in Sindh in 2011 will have gone to the back of the minds of a generation of bureaucrats that have now moved on. That a return to the default position of learned inability to do anything positive or constructive in the face of natural events will leave Sindh and anywhere else in Pakistan as rabbits in onrushing headlights. An event as overwhelming as that in Houston is going to happen in Pakistan and probably affect Karachi and other low-lying urban conurbations along the flood-lines of the Indus. India will seek to serve itself and release waters from upstream dams to preserve its own lands and people. What those that follow the news are watching in the US is the future for millions of us. Got that? Fine. OK…you can go back to sleep now.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 31^st, 2017.

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