As a biting winter chill has already gripped the flood-stricken regions around the country, authorities are hastening plans to cope with any eventuality stemming from weather vagaries or other natural phenomena like seismic activity or land-sliding during the current winter season.
The winter has its own wants and oppressions, which turn the routine life topsy-turvy. Freezing temperatures in the snow-bound mountainous regions and smoggy conditions in the plains of Punjab and Sindh provinces restrict mobility and multiply miseries facing the people. Presently, choking smog has blanketed the Punjab province, forcing school closures in Lahore, and a cold wave is sweeping the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and Sindh provinces. The winter situation in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan has been exacerbated by the monsoon rains and flooding. As the country is still reeling under the flood disaster, the provincial disaster management authorities have been chalking out emergency plans for timely response to any untoward situation arising from rains and snowfall or flooding and land-sliding.
According to a report published on these pages, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) has devised winter contingency plan under the guidance of the Relief, Rehabilitation and Settlement Department to cope with natural hazards, like extreme low temperature, fog and smog, snowfall, floods and land-slides or earthquakes, which the province often faces during the winter season. As put forth by PDMA chief Sharif Hussain, all stakeholders of the federal government as well as the provincial government and development partners have been taken onboard during preparation of the contingency plan, which is based on a detailed overview of the vulnerability profile of winter hazards for the entire province.
As the weather events have taken sharp turn to have their impact on the country, which, by all accounts, is extremely vulnerable to natural disaster, the situation on the ground is even worse in the flood-stricken districts around the country. The hapless situation arising from the floods is further exposed by the latest report of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance, which citing satellite imagery says that floodwaters still inundate over a dozen districts in Sindh and Balochistan.
KP’s winter contingency plan, which precedes such plan from other provinces, is based on the data of weather events and damages to the flood affected population, and it has categorized the districts on a disaster-prone scale as very high, high and medium, low risk districts and is an inclusive exercise to take stock of what exists in terms of resources and scale of the disaster. It sounds inspiring that the KP’s winter contingency plan covers details about the composite risk score of every district based on the different types of hazards to which a district is prone and also explains corresponding risks associated with natural hazards.
Although the plan requires all the districts to identify such vulnerable sites and map the available resources, it should be implemented in a way that the emergency response is triggered in the event of snowfall, landslides or road closures or any subsequent shortage of supplies and commodities to mitigate the sufferings of the poor masses.
