A decade after the disastrous 2005 earthquake, on October 26 Pakistan's northern areas experienced another massive earthquake, which measured 7.7 on the Richter scale. Fortunately though, the earthquake's epicentre was 200 miles below earth's surface compared to just 15 miles that triggered the 2005 earthquake. But damage to physical infrastructure has been substantial and aftershocks of the earthquake haven't ended.
To-date, the 2005 earthquake has been the worst disaster that struck Pakistan; even the 1965 and 1971 wars didn't cause as much damage as did that earthquake - casualties and destruction of physical infrastructure, a lot of which is yet unrepaired despite huge foreign assistance and billions of rupees being allocated annually from the PSDP during the last decade.
After the 2005 earthquake, geological experts had again emphasised the fact that Pakistan's northern areas lie on the junction of the Indo-Australian, Eurasian and Iranian tectonic plates that keep colliding with each other and, over thousands of years, the Mount Everest - world's highest mountain - gradually rose to its present height as a result of thereof.
Since 1885, this ongoing phenomenon caused 12 major earthquakes measuring 6.6 to 8.5 on the Richter scale. Yet only a fraction of the energy generated by collisions of the tectonic plates has been released; our political leadership appears oblivious to the fact that this energy will periodically find its way to the surface of the planet via earthquakes and eruption of volcanos.
This prospect renders Pakistan's northern areas, including the mega cities therein, highly vulnerable, as proved by the recent earthquake - the most dangerous to-date. But despite the 2005 earthquake, civil administrations didn't do much in the last decade to confront earthquakes. Proof: after the recent earthquake, many affected areas are yet to receive relief services and supplies.
Despite the revelations that earthquakes will be regular events, we reflect excessive reliance on the armed forces for rescue work instead of equipping civil administrations to render essential rescue services, the critical being quick repair of roads damaged by land sliding because without it, help cannot reach the affected people in widespread habitations in the mountainous areas.
Quick access to earthquake-hit areas can save lives, but success in this effort requires building the ability - trained manpower and requisite equipment - for delivering this critical rescue service. It is no more in doubt that this resource combination will be an ever-higher necessity in the mountainous regions to fairly share with the armed forces the burden of rescue operations.
Until the 1960s, scouting was a compulsory activity in schools, and besides rescue work, children were taught how to administer first aid to the injured. It is amazing that successive governments didn't notice that school-going children were no longer being taught these disciplines that could prepare them for supporting rescue operations. Yet no politician appears bothered about this neglect.
The 2005 tragedy had highlighted the criticality of making it mandatory for builders to comply with earthquake damage-preventive modifications in the structures of buildings in earthquake-prone areas, especially houses built in villages and small towns to prevent their quick collapse, but losses caused by the recent earthquake indicate that building unstable houses, schools, and shopping centres, went on.
In the recent earthquake, over 9,000 houses were damaged exposing criminal flaws in the construction sector and gaps in the calibre and integrity of builders and building control authorities, which remained unaddressed. Politicians, including those in the opposition whose regimes left behind a backlog in this crucial context, can't bury this reality under the rubble of their rhetoric.
The other area that continues to be neglected is the state of hundreds of old buildings - some of them over a century old - that can collapse in future earthquakes of even moderate intensity. Reasons: firstly, structures of these buildings weren't designed to withstand strong earthquakes and, secondly, for decades, maintenance and repair of these buildings has been ignored.
Despite knowing about the vulnerability of these buildings (and civil administrations ignoring the threats they pose) people continue to live in them. Even a city like Karachi has scores of such buildings. Neither the civil administration bothers about strengthening these buildings - some of them really beautiful - nor about demolishing them and building new earthquake resistant buildings. The government has yet to realise and prepare the civil administration for confronting the likes of the 2005 earthquake during which, in a matter of seconds schools, colleges, hospitals and offices were reduced to heaps of rubble burying underneath hundreds of human beings; in Azad Kashmir, the dead count amounted to one generation of its inhabitants.
An encouraging development this time was the administration's quick grasp of the magnitude of the calamity and spread of the affected areas because the damage this time was far less compared to its size in 2005, not because of an enhancement in the civil administrations' capacity to face up to such disasters. However, this quick response is commendable.
But while the government is focused on relief efforts and giving small cash handouts to the injured and the survivors of the dead, what the victims eagerly await to plan their future is a credible plan (which should have been devised based on the 2005 experience) for rehabilitating the victims and its implementation schedule.
In the past, rehabilitation became a venue for pocketing of state funds by those who were assigned this task. The result of this blunder is portrayed by the miserable state of many areas affected by the 2005 earthquake. Unless accountability of those assigned the task of rehabilitation takes into account the input of the supposedly 'rehabilitated' victims, this effort will fail yet again.
In the coming years, while earthquakes will impact Pakistan's northern areas, the south of the country may confront tsunamis - consequence of the unabated greenhouse effect and planet warming. It is mind boggling to imagine what would happen if Karachi with a population of over 20 million inhabitants would become the target of a tsunami or a Katrina-like storm.
That Karachi may be affected by such disasters is one dimension of this horrible dream; the other bewildering dimensions are the questions mark hanging over the ability of the city's rescue services and of its sky-scrappers to withstand disasters. The way the KBCA-builders club has been violating building regulations in constructing supposedly strong structures doesn't augur well.
The future-blind bureaucrats don't realise that if a tsunami, a storm, or an earthquake hits any major city, the state will have to pick up the pieces. The collapse (in less than five seconds) of the visibly strong Margalla Towers points to the virtual open house declared by the building control authorities on constructing fragile (though beautiful looking) sky-scrappers.
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