WITH five consecutive years of flooding since 2010 one would have thought that by now some basic lessons would have been learned.

But going by the experience of Chitral and Alipur and parts of Layyah in the past few days, it seems that no effort has been made to increase preparedness.

Flash floods have devastated most of Chitral, and large parts of Alipur were submerged with locals having little to no warning about the impending disaster.

*Know more: Most of Chitral paralysed by flash floods*

Technologies exist that can provide up to three hours of warning of an impending flash flood for mountainous regions, and have been deployed in places such as Bangladesh.

Likewise, alerting local populations in the plains of a breach in the embankment and the imminent arrival of floodwaters is possible using SMS technologies. But nothing of the sort happened.

The most important aspects of flood preparedness, it seems, have not been addressed despite disasters year after year every monsoon season.

Flood preparedness is not so much about building brick-and-mortar infrastructure as it is about putting in place systems to lengthen lead times in weather forecasts, accurately model river flows and generate targeted alerts for affected populations so that they can move to higher ground before the arrival of the floodwaters. But in Chitral, and again in Alipur, no warnings were issued, except in a few isolated cases using mosque loudspeakers, which is a woefully inadequate method in this era of mobile communications.

And despite the passage of more than five years now, a model to accurately forecast river flows is only just getting ready for deployment as the monsoon season brings with it its first large-scale flooding.

Unfortunately, the government insists on repeating the same mistake year after year: getting caught by surprise, then rushing to announce compensation after the floodwaters have already inflicted much damage.

The Met department remains stubbornly wedded to its hopelessly outdated forecasting techniques, and other departments, such as irrigation and revenue and the myriad different disaster management agencies, all become spectators, while the district management struggles to run relief centres and arrange boats. But the key tasks of managing any disaster — forecasting where it will occur — continue to languish.

It is high time we saw streamlined systems put in place to increase our capacity to manage floods. It is also about time the conversation about flood management moved beyond outdated notions of building more dams.

Without a proper signalling system and lead times, there is little point in issuing fresh instructions to the district management each year to remain alert.

Developing proper signalling is clearly the domain of the provincial administrations, whereas getting superior forecasts with longer lead times is the job of the federal government. But our experience thus far shows there is little we can do this year other than pray for kinder weather.

Published in Dawn, July 22nd, 2015

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