The cloudburst and woes of city dwellers
THE overnight downpour of last Monday (July 27) and the limitless suffering it caused to the city dwellers should serve the authorities looking after its welfare with fresh warning as to how this mega-city is teetering as it were on the edge of a precipice.
That the city is not safe for its population has been proved on several occasions. One may cite here the deluge of 1988, which also caught the city authorities and the people by surprise. Again in 2004, we experienced a similar kind of powerlessness as the government could do little to take necessary measures to protect the people as a downpour and flood had caught the city quite unprepared.
Meanwhile, much water has flowed down the river Buriganga and at the same time the city has swollen out of proportions in terms of its population, the number of vehicles plying on the roads and the buildings and other physical infrastructures constructed on it. But all this has happened in a chaotic fashion.
Strangely though, we often try to pass this bulging of the city for growth knowing fully well that all kinds of quantitative growth are not a sign of development. And this basic weakness in this city's physical infrastructures gets exposed every time a downpour or a flood hits it. Thank God, the city dwellers' woes have so far remained limited only to floods, downpours and occasional storms or cyclones.
One shudders to think what would have happened had the city ever been struck by an earthquake comparable in intensity to the one that jolted southwest China in the early part of last month, or the one that shook central Italy in April this year. Even these resourceful and well-managed countries were at a loss in the face of such calamities. Just think of our own state of preparedness against such eventualities. It is least said the better!
Leaving aside the issue of earthquake, let us again turn our attention to the overnight downpour that threw the city-dwellers into a state of great distress. The first thing we noticed, and which was well reported in the media, was the picture of a capital city that has a poor drainage system to get rid of the waters that accumulates after a heavy rain or a flood.
The dislocation in communication, the scene of the pedestrians and different kinds of vehicles trying to reach their destinations braving waist-deep rainwater, and the commuters remaining stranded at different places, were just the tip of the iceberg. How the rain brought the city to a standstill rendering the offices and workplaces without work was only a minor part of the story.
In fact, the full picture of the havoc and the extent of the damaged caused by the torrential rain became clear in the days that followed. We are now gradually coming to know how the wholesale markets had to pay dearly for establishing their business in a city that has been growing blindly. The damage done to the goods kept in the submerged warehouses in different parts of the city amounted to at least one billion taka, claimed a leader of the Bangladesh shop owners' association.
The owners of the submerged stocks of food grains at the Muhammadpur agricultural commodity market have been compelled to sell their rice stocks damaged by rainwater mixed with dirty and stinking water from the city's drains at a throwaway price in a desperate bid to recover as much of their capital as possible. If truth be told, they will be able to get back only a negligible portion of the investments they had made in the business.
Meanwhile, many traders of these submerged markets have gone broke. Who is going to compensate for the damage sustained by these traders for no fault of their own making? Have the city authorities any satisfactory answer to this question?
The irony is that similar damage to the citizens' properties and loss to the capital of the businesspeople occurred in the past, too. But those tragedies could hardly wake up the authorities from their eternal slumber.
As a consequence, during all these years the city has been getting submerged under water in times of sudden visitations by natural calamities like cloudbursts or floods, to the utter dismay of its citizens. Are the authorities in charge of the city still thinking that they will be able to survive the next flood or torrential downpour in a similar fashion?
It is not only that the city's capacity to stand the mounting pressures on its dilapidated infrastructures have been stretched to their limits, the limits of tolerance of its population have also reached their breaking point. The latest cloudburst should be taken as a warning for the city authorities.
Things have come to such a pass that the people may not remain calm and blame only Nature and their fate for all the sufferings they have to face during such calamities in the future in this city. For they have already started to ask disturbing questions about the role of the city authorities in such times of distress. So they must start work now to develop the city's drainage system and enhance its level of preparedness to face such emergencies in the future.
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