A landslide of our own making

A massive rockslide has blocked the main roadway connecting some 50 villages in Havelian tehsil from rest of K-P

The story is not an unfamiliar one. It is essentially about official negligence, indifference and possibly, ineptitude. A massive rockslide, which local people and their representatives believe was triggered by the October 26 earthquake, has blocked the main roadway connecting some 50 villages in Havelian tehsil in Abbotabad district from the rest of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Islamabad. The people of these villages, with a population of 120,000, must walk for two hours on rough, hilly terrain to reach a road on which there is running transport to Havelian and beyond. The worst-affected village has been that of Poona Hill, from where 30 out of 250 families have moved away out of fear of further landslides. To complicate matters further, the rocks which tumbled down the hill between November 20 and 21, also blocked a major waterway, stopping the flow and causing water levels to rise dangerously in what is now a 600 square feet body of water.

The key point here is that this mishap could have been averted and the suffering of tens of thousands of people avoided. Local leaders say the cracks that had developed in the hill had been pointed out to the authorities immediately after the 7.5 Richter scale earthquake. Yet nothing was done to reinforce the hillside despite the warning of landslides. We wonder what our disaster management authorities are doing, or why we as taxpayers are indeed paying for those set up at national, provincial or district levels if they are unable to offer people the support they need. The entire purpose of these management authorities is to prevent disasters or mitigate the losses they result in. It is clear that they are not succeeding. Right now, the priority must be to rescue affected people, secure the hillside, review safety for villages located on Poona Hill and do everything possible to restore road links. People urgently need support. There has already been too long a delay in offering them this and there must be no further delays in providing relief to the affectees. 

Published in The Express Tribune, November 24^th,  2015.

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