IT happened again. The heavens opened, the clouds burst upon the house of cards that is Karachi’s crumbling infrastructure, and it all fell apart. For those unlucky enough to have been far from home on Aug 19, it was a nightmare. The lack of adequate warning meant this applied to millions. The speed of the extreme rain and the absence of any measures to deal with it paralysed roads, highways and bridges within an hour of its onset. Since the rain did not relent (according to some estimates, the total recorded was around 120mm on the initial day) the situation only got worse — and then deadly.
Commuters who got a head start in their journey home, faced terrifying currents of water. Many waiting in stalled cars saw the water rising around them. The rain continued and traffic remained jammed as evening turned into night. Many made anxious calls to family and friends to try to figure out what to do. The situation was particularly difficult for women commuting alone, who did not feel comfortable abandoning their cars and trying to reach home safely on foot. Yet as the torrents enveloped them, this is what they were forced to do. Those stuck on Sharea Faisal waded through waist-deep water to get to service roads and buildings on the side.
This path was made much more treacherous by the fact that when it starts to pour in Karachi, many people uncover manholes outside their homes and offices to ‘facilitate’ drainage. Of course, the problem is that these uncovered manholes represent the greatest danger during extreme rainfall, as people wading through the water to safety can fall into them and not be able to extricate themselves. Naturally, this weighs on those trying to decide whether to abandon their cars and attempt to reach higher ground.
Without doubt, Karachi residents rose to the occasion.
People who stayed in their offices faced problems too. Most thought they would only have to wait a few hours before the rain stopped and could then make their way home. However, the rain continued, creating a separate wave of panic later in the evening when people realised they would likely be stuck for many more hours, without food or water. By this time, much of the city was without electricity, which meant that many stranded people could not charge their phones to stay in touch with family members. The worst situation befell parents who had to pick up children from after-school activities because they had no idea how they would reach them.
Without doubt, Karachiites rose to the occasion in coming to the aid of those who were stranded. Within hours, many aid connections were made through WhatsApp or other social media platforms. This, however, is not what a city of 16 million should have to resort to when it comes to extreme precipitation — episodes of which, unsurprisingly, are only expected to increase as Pakistan bears the consequences of climate change. These effects are felt acutely in a dense urban environment like Karachi because the natural drainage and catchment systems have been eliminated by man-made structures. In such environments, drainage systems are built to make up for the absence of natural ones. But this is not the case in this megalopolis.
The ethnopolitical make-up of the province and its relations with the federal government for the past many decades point to the fact that Karachi cannot hope for improvement or a sudden moment of conscience that would make administrators and leaders actually create systems to prevent such paralysing events. However, if the city cannot have a rain management system, perhaps it could at least have a rain forecasting system that would give enough notice to the people to prepare.
Incidentally, rese-arch for this already exists as in the case of the study carried out at Harvard. In Rainfall-driven machine learning models for accurate flood inundation mapping in Karachi, Umair Rasool and his co-authors test different machine learning models to see how AI can better predict pluvial flooding (flooding that cannot be absorbed by drainage systems). The study reveals how the frequency and intensity of rainfall events and careful consideration of influencing factors can help build more accurate predictive models. These could, among other things, predict flood inundation points in the city.
If politicians want to shift blame and indulge in the same shenanigans they always do, perhaps the demand before them can change — to at least invest in research like this so that people receive some semblance of a warning before the big, bad rains lash and devastate the city.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, August 23rd, 2025