'Early action may have avoided water contamination'

Shahida Kausar Farooq, Chairperson Subha-e-Nau, an organisation working for environmental up-gradation and public health, has said that if the city government instead of spending millions on parks and other such projects had taken care of issues of urgent nature like water, the Landhi incident could have been avoided.
She regretted that the most important issue was kept on sidelines.
"Sadly, we have not learnt our lessons from continual occurrences of such disasters in Landhi, Hyderabad as well as Lahore", she said in a statement Thursday.
She said death toll in the recent crisis was a matter of concern for all while hundreds were suffering from diarrhoea and other stomach related diseases.
"We have been shouting hoarse over water issues for the past decade with much too little effect," Shahida said and added that she had been reminding the higher authorities from time to time about these issues of public concern.
She criticised obsolete clean water and sewage lines, dangerously running side by side and stressed the urgent replacement of such lines.
Ill-planned digging of roads continuously damaged water and sewage lines running under them.
"We are still stuck in water and sanitation problems, public health problems, which are at least 50 years old in the developed world", she pointed out.
She said Karachi Water Systems Strengthening Project which had been lying at the backburner since 2001 should be implemented without delay so that people could get relief from the menace of contaminated in water.
She explained that this project was aimed at repairing the leaking water and sewerage lines across Karachi and was the first step towards solving the water crisis.
Commenting on Government's plans to install filtration plants, she said that billions allocated for water filtration would not work in the long term.
"The water is contaminated with chemicals from industry and with bacteria which cannot be simply removed by boiling. The toxic chemicals dissolved in water cannot be simply filtered out, while the filter plants too cannot be maintained with such waste in the water".
Instead, she stressed, the planners should go for simple replacement and separation of water lines, correction of leakage as well as stopping powerful detergents from further corroding the lines and the intestines of the poor.