By Aflatoon
Ninety-seven people have died since the monsoon began on June 26. Two hundred and ninety-seven have been injured. Eleven of the deaths happened in the last twenty-four hours.
I have been reading the National Disaster Management Authority’s situation reports for a month now, and there is one line in them I cannot get past. It appears in every edition, phrased almost identically each time, and it is never the headline.
House collapses remained the leading cause of deaths.
Not floods. Not landslides. Not lightning, though lightning is in there. The single largest category of monsoon deaths in Pakistan is buildings falling on the people inside them.
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I want to sit with what that sentence actually describes, because the phrase “house collapse” is doing a great deal of work to make it bearable.
It describes a family asleep. It describes a roof — mud, or unreinforced brick, or concrete poured thin over inadequate steel — that has been absorbing water for some hours. It describes the moment the load exceeds what the material can carry. It describes people who were indoors, which is where you are told to be.
Every flood advisory in the country tells people to stay inside and avoid unnecessary travel. For a substantial number of Pakistanis, inside is the dangerous place. The advice is not wrong, exactly. It is just written for a country where the buildings hold.
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Four hundred and forty-seven houses damaged. Two hundred and sixty-nine livestock animals dead.
I notice the livestock are counted individually. This is not a criticism of the NDMA, which is doing the job of counting and doing it more transparently than most agencies in this country. It is an observation about what our instruments are built to see. We have a precise unit for buffalo. For a house we have “damaged”, which covers everything from a cracked wall to a family of six under a slab.
And we have no unit at all for the thing that actually determines whether a house comes down: whether the person who built it could afford steel.
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Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: fifty-two dead. Punjab: twenty-nine. Azad Kashmir: seven. Balochistan: six. Sindh: two. Gilgit-Baltistan: one.
Forty-three of the ninety-seven were children.
The rain is not distributed the way the deaths are. Punjab has taken enormous rainfall this month; seven people died there in a single day this weekend and twenty were injured. But Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has nearly twice Punjab’s total for the season, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is not nearly twice as wet.
What varies more than the rainfall is the building stock. And the building stock varies with income, and with terrain, and with how far the nearest inspector is willing to travel, and with whether anyone has ever enforced a building code in a place where enforcement means telling a poor man his house is illegal without offering him another one.
This is the part where I am supposed to call for enforcement. I find I cannot do it cleanly. A building code enforced against people who have no money is not a safety measure; it is a demolition programme. The enforcement has to arrive attached to something — materials, credit, a subsidised span of proper roofing — or it simply converts a drowning into an eviction.
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Here is what I keep returning to.
We treat the monsoon as a weather story. It arrives, we count, the count rises, the count is reported, the season ends, the count is filed. Next June we begin again, from zero, with the same building stock.
But a weather story is a story about something that happens to you. Ninety-seven deaths from a monsoon is not a thing that happened to Pakistan. Rain happened to Pakistan. The deaths happened because of decisions — about what people can afford to build with, about which settlements get inspected, about whether disaster spending goes to rescue after the fact or reinforcement before it. Those are policy questions with policy answers, and they are answerable in the eleven months when it is not raining.
Instead the eleven months are spent on other things, and then it rains, and then we are surprised, and the NDMA writes the same line again.
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Last year the season killed 242 people, at least 116 of them children. That number was reported. It was, briefly, a national conversation. Then the rain stopped.
I do not know what this year’s final figure will be. It is ninety-seven today, and the Met Office expects heavy falls over Islamabad and Kashmir in the next forty-eight hours, and Azad Kashmir votes on Monday under that forecast.
What I do know is the shape of the sentence that will be written about it. It will say that the monsoon killed them.
It will not say that the ceilings did.
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Aflatoon is a satirist and observer of the Pakistani condition. His column, Intellectual Voices, appears in The Pakistan Daily.
