One of the major causes of floods is insufficient dams and their stability.

Pakistan is in
deficient of dams and the one which are present are not capable enough to deal with high
intensity and pressure water flows. The flood water is mainly the cause of heavy rainfall or
even the melting of snow from the mountains in the summers. So the heavy water flow is
not being dealt properly, as there is less dam which can store that water which can be
reused for the purpose of generating electricity later so precious water is being wasted
unused. This excess water flows out of the dams and then makes the way towards the
surroundings and ultimately carrying everything which comes in its way.
Salination is another reason which results in the cause of floods. The water which is being
drained down the mountains after the melting of the snow carries excessive minerals and
salts with them. This water is being carried in to the dams for the storage purpose. When
the water is being stored the salts and minerals which are present in it just settle down at
the base of the water, this just reduces the water storage capacity of the dams and for the
next time they store less water in them and the remaining water makes its journey in the
shape of floods; this low storage capacity of the dams also results in the causing of floods
when the heavy flow of water is being drained in to the dams.
Low awareness and education regarding the use of flood water is also one valid reason
which causes the floods and its devastating effects in Pakistan. The farmers are not aware
of how to use the flood waters for their use, and even government has not played their part
in making such infrastructure possible which includes the artificial canals which can carry
the flood water to the fields in a proper manner and can make the flood water used for the
purpose of irrigating the fields. These are all the reasons which have contributed in making
the floods one of the greatest threats for the people of Pakistan.

The current flooding in Pakistan is mainly due to climate change (Report, 9

August). It is the unusual climate-change-led seasonal cycle of land
temperature in Pakistan that has exacerbated the monsoon rainfall and
produced the hugest volume of water in the northern mountainous region of
the country ever recorded in the history, causing floods in the Indus river
basin. Various scientific studies have already shown that the monsoon regions
of the world will be affected by climate change more than any other regions on
Earth.
It is high time that the world in general and carbon-emitting industrial
countries in particular showed responsibility and extended help
to Pakistan not only in relief activities for the flood affectees at the moment,
but also for developing a sustainable adaptation mechanism in the country
to mitigate climate-change-led calamities of such kind in future.
Syed Mujahid Ali Shah
University of Greifswald, Germany

 The people of Pakistan may be in God's hands now that swathes of Sindh lie
under water, but for decades they have been in the hands of an Islamabad
coterie who have failed to deliver autonomy or basic rights to its citizens.
Pakistan's problems are regional problems and they lie rooted in bad
governance. Islamabad's attempt to centralise a state around Wahhabism
promoted institutionalised Islamic extremism and destroyed traditional values
of tolerance. Globalisation offers a chance to shrug this off and support the
viable self-determination of Sindh, Baloch and Punjab peoples within a
Pakistani state a state that, if reformed, could bring security and a new
model of governance to the region. It's time the international community
recognised this and listened to Pakistan's people instead of its jet-setting
leaders.
Andrew Swan
y
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What Caused the

Massive Flooding in
Pakistan?
A ClimateWire investigation into the origins of the flood
disaster uncovered evidence that points to a calamity

caused by man, the cumulative effect of erratic weather

forecast by climate change models, massive deforestation,
and lax attention to infrastructure. Part 1 of 4.

By Nathanial Gronewold, ClimateWire on October 12, 2010

9

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Credit: NWS, Courtesy NOAA.gov

NOWSHERA, Pakistan -- "Allah was angry with us when the rain came."
Sumaira Bibi unhesitatingly leans on theology to explain what happened here
on the night of July 29, when her world was drowned.
Her husband was out of town for work. The 37-year-old mother was left with
her five children and sister-in-law to settle in for the night. Then the incessant
rain began to swamp this city in northwestern Pakistan, about 50 miles from
the Afghan border. It didn't take long for the water spilling over the doorways
to send her family on a desperate bid for survival.
"After six hours, we managed to get out with many of our neighbors, wet and
scared," said Bibi, who now takes refuge with her husband and children at a
camp run by an Islamic charity group. "The rain still did not stop, but we
followed the rest of people who had got a boat."
The sounds she remembers most were the anguished cries of frightened
children, women screaming for their loved ones, and the unending rain that
caused the Kabul River here to sprawl far outside its banks. She and her
children made it to higher ground, but not before losing her home and her

brother-in-law, who hasn't been seen since.

"The river Kabul was like a demon, swishing with so much water and
overflowing the whole of Nowshera. It is something I have never seen in my
life," recalled her neighbor Zunaira, 34, who was pushed out of nearby
Risalpur village by the floods. "We had to put a hand on our children's eyes, as
they were getting more and more scared with each moment."
The cities of Nowshera and neighboring Charsadda, in Pakistan's Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa province (formerly Northwest Frontier province), and their
suburbs were the first major communities hit by the unprecedented flooding
that swamped one-fifth of Pakistan and left about 7 million homeless this
summer. Both women saw scores of buildings, men, women and children
swept away by the floods. Though the government puts the death toll for the
entire province at about 1,500, almost everyone here believes the actual
number of dead is far higher.
These communities found themselves at the epicenter of an unusual weather
pattern that dumped record rainfall on northwestern Pakistan and sent
floodwaters surging from the north to the rest of the nation.
Residents describing the deluge say it began with a constant, pounding rain
that started around July 28 and continued for a week. There were brief pauses
of stifling heat and humidity, quickly followed by more rain. It went on that
way for over a month. The center of Nowshera was flooded in some places up
to 10 feet above street level.
Given such accounts, it's easy to see why Zunaira, Bibi and many other
Pakistanis attribute their nation's worst-ever natural disaster to God's wrath.
The government attributes the disaster to global warming, but there's more to
the story. A ClimateWire investigation into the origins of the flood disaster
uncovered evidence that points to a calamity caused by man, the cumulative
effect of erratic weather forecast by climate change models, massive
deforestation, and lax attention to infrastructure maintenance and
engineering standards.
The story of the 2010 flooding in Pakistan is a warning to other vulnerable
nations that experts believe will bear the brunt of the gradual shifts in climate
and weather patterns expected over the coming decades.
But it's also a sign of how much of the developing world is willfully making
itself more vulnerable to climate change, even as poor nations ask rich ones to

spend hundreds of billions per year on helping them to adapt. If the

industrialized world is to blame for pumping heat-trapping gases into the
atmosphere, Pakistanis are also at fault for eroding their country's ability to
cope with the consequences.
Final cries of the unrecorded dead
Shehryar Shah, station manager at 93.0 Radio Dilber in Charsadda,
remembers the thousands of phone calls his team broadcast over the air from
July 28 to alert the Pakistan Army as to where people were stranded. His news
and talk station was virtually alone in covering the onset of the flooding as
national media attention was fixated on a crash that same day of an Airblue
passenger plane in the Margalla Hills, just north of Islamabad.
"We broadcasted these rescue cries for three days, and then we moved to the
relief phase," he said.
One of his most painful memories involves a caller indicating that there were
about 235 people stuck on rooftops in one part of town waiting for help,
calling again and again when no one came. "After two or three hours, there
was no more contact with them. Their cell phone was off," Shah said,
distraught. "But the government is still insisting just 69 dead in Charsadda."
The SOS calls were interrupted occasionally only by the public service
announcements Radio Dilber broadcast on behalf of the provincial disaster
management authorities, alerting residents to where the river was breaching
its banks and how high it had reached. He described rushing floodwaters up to
20 feet deep in some places. The storm grounded army rescue helicopters for
at least two days.
"These people never expected such a huge flood in this region," Shah said. The
last time his town was hit by such devastation was in 1929, but even then, the
extent of flooding was much lighter, nothing like that seen this summer, he
insists.
What Shah and the citizens of Nowshera and Charsadda witnessed in those
days was a perfect storm event never before seen in Pakistan's history.
Government officials say that from July 28 to Aug. 3, parts of Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa recorded almost 12 feet of rainfall in one week. The province
normally averages slightly above 3 feet for an entire year.
"We say that there is some part of the climate change effect there in this
flooding," said Azmat Hayat Khan, a scientist at the Pakistan Meteorological
Department (PMD), part of his nation's Ministry of Defense. "This is an

historical event."
What is also exceptional about this year's monsoon, Khan and other PMD
officials say, is that it was centered so far north, and over one of Pakistan's
driest regions.
The northern section of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa usually sees scattered rains
during the monsoon season, but never the deluge it had this year. The
inundation even spread as far north as Gilgit and Skardu in Pakistaniadministered Kashmir, a mountainous region that had never seen the
monsoons.
"Never before have the monsoons gone that far north," said Abdul Qadir, an
environment and energy expert at the U.N. Development Programme who is
now leading flood recovery efforts in Gilgit. "I think this was the first time in
recorded history that there was so much rain in the high alpine areas, and that
really basically created these flash floods." Flash flooding led to more deaths in
the north than anywhere else.
Monsoons shift away from normal watersheds
Pakistan's monsoon rains normally emanate from moisture swept in over
India from the Bay of Bengal. In typical years, the rains open up in the east,
centered on Punjab province, roughly near the cities of Lahore and Faisalabad.
Experts say the rains then migrate northwest, dissipating by the time they
reach the capital, Islamabad, and ending in scattered rains before dying out in
Afghanistan.
Isolated flooding incidents occur every year, but Punjab is normally capable of
absorbing the monsoon rains. The densely populated province is home to four
major rivers that eventually drain into the Indus River, the nation's largest.
Punjab is also home to an intricate network of irrigation and water
management systems designed for crop use, energy production and flood
control.
But for the past few decades, PMD officials have noticed that the center of
Pakistan's monsoon has been gradually shifting to the northwest, away from
the nation's watershed in Punjab. Whereas flat Punjab is home to long,
winding river systems capable of absorbing enormous quantities of water,
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Federally Administered Tribal Areas on the Afghan
border generate relatively shorter and narrow rivers cascading from the
mountains that cover roughly half the region.
"Over the past 25 to 30 years, there is a latitudinal redistribution," Khan

explained. "Previously, in the past, our flooding was in these river systems [in
Punjab], but ... the rainfall has shifted. Its main focus has changed from the
eastern parts to the western parts."
PMD believes that climate change is to blame for this northwesterly migration
of the monsoons.
The same trend occurred again this year, only farther northwest than ever
before, to lands with few major rivers to absorb rains but plenty of vertical
surface area to collect water and sweep it downstream. From Lahore and
Faisalabad in the east, this year the center and start of Pakistan's monsoon
season became instead Nowshera and Charsadda.
And like the fabled "perfect storm" of North Atlantic lore, those monsoon
rains eventually collided into two other atmospheric anomalies happening at
the same time, creating a perfect storm of their own.
As the monsoons were headed for Pakistan's northwest, from July 25 to Aug. 5
a portion of the jet stream was forced farther south than usual for this time of
year by a system of blocking air that mysteriously developed over western
China. This buckling of the jet stream dragged with it a wave of low pressure
from the west, a system PMD calls the "westerly wave."
This westerly wave low-pressure area collects moisture from the
Mediterranean Sea and is responsible for the snows that fall in the Karakoram
Mountains. But it usually only comes that far south in the winter months -- in
the summer, the normal pattern is for the westerly wave to track north of
Afghanistan and miss Pakistan completely.
But because of the blockage of the jet stream's normal course, the westerly
wave followed its winter trajectory in late July and early August instead,
meeting the monsoon system at Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
"Subtropical highs that normally redistribute heat in this region, they were
shifted northward," said PMD scientist Muhammad Hanif, describing the
system that developed over western China that disturbed the jet stream. "This
type of interaction is not very usual."
A climate change-related mystery
The cause of this blocking system in western China remains a mystery.
Pakistan's Ministry of Environment suspects climate change is to blame,
through record high surface temperatures on land. PMD is investigating that,
but is also investigating the possibility that the La Nia phenomenon in the

Pacific Ocean caused the disturbance. But all agree that the excessive amount
of moisture pumped into the atmosphere is a result of high water surface
temperatures in the Mediterranean and Bay of Bengal.
That added fuel, and the constrained movement of air caused by the jet
stream's dip created a column of rain clouds towering 40,000 feet above
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, much higher than normal monsoon storm clouds,
which rarely top 10,000 feet in height. There the clouds stayed for a week,
dumping up to 12 feet of excess moisture before traveling to the far west of
China, inundating communities there and killing some 1,200 people in
landslides.
It was a weather event that the residents of Nowshera, most now either living
in camps or in the wrecked hulls of what is left of their homes, say they will
never forget.
"These terrible memories will go with me to my grave," camp resident Zunaira
said.
"When rain came on Thursday night, we all panicked, it was really very scary,"
recalled Shamsa, a 16-year-old girl put out of her home and into one of tent
cities now ringing the town. "I thought we all were going to drown in
floodwaters and die that night, and we had to put up staying on the rooftop of
a clinic for two days. But Allah sent the Pakistan Army, who came in their
rescue boats and rescued us."
And if this "superflood" event struck at the worst possible place, it also struck
at the worst possible time.
Record high temperatures in Pakistan's far north were already producing
higher amounts of snowmelt and glacial meltwater runoff from the Karakoram
Range and into the Indus River System. Thus, the Indus and other rivers were
already swollen with water in the north by the time the supercell of rains from
east and west merged above them.
Rivers already filled with 'glacial bursts'
"We have been noticing these glacial bursts from the last couple of years," said
Hameed Ullah Jan Afridi, Pakistan's minister for environment, in an
interview. "This is not the first time, so that was in addition to the floods
which happened."
The result for Pakistan's northwest was flash flooding that killed at least 1,500
people, according to government estimates; washed out numerous bridges;

and destroyed a section of the fabled Karakoram Highway, cutting off half a
million people from the outside world. At least 70 percent of both Nowshera
and Charsadda was completely swamped, as nearby rivers and streams proved
incapable of handling the water that came crashing down from the highlands.
The south of Pakistan wasn't spared.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's perfect storm was followed on its heels by a second
wave of weather that dropped heavy monsoon rains over the Punjab
watershed from Aug. 2 to 9, Khan said.
These storms were also strong, with Mianwali, a city at the heart of the
downpour, recording 20 inches of rainfall in three days. That more normal
monsoon pattern arrived just in time to catch the record volumes of rainwater
streaming down the Indus river system from the heavily hit northwest.
Massive torrents of water from the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi and Sutlej rivers fed
by these monsoon rains eventually met the Indus at Rajanpur district in
southern Punjab. From there, the waters flowed south into Sindh province on
their way to the ocean, spilling far beyond the Indus' banks. Floodwaters also
spread west into Balochistan, causing devastation there, as well.
A disaster seen from space
This summer's catastrophe was continuously fed by rainstorms that hit the
nation sporadically until around mid-September, though Pakistanis say their
monsoon season typically concludes at the end of August. At its height, the
floodwaters could be seen from space, with the Indus spreading more than 20
miles wide at some parts.
Every province was hit, and all told, 20 million Pakistanis are said to have
been affected in some way by the flooding. About 1,800 are thought to have
perished, though Pakistani aid workers and victims dispute the relatively low
number, nothing that thousands are still probably missing.
The destruction of hundreds of thousands of homes has forced an estimated 8
million to sleep under tents, in makeshift shelters or out in the open.
Thousands of acres of cropland has been destroyed just as planting season was
to commence, and roughly 10 million head of livestock are believed to have
been killed.
Both the United Nations and Pakistani government officials are convinced that
climate change was the key contributing factor to the devastation. The cycle of
dry spells that Pakistan has suffered for the past few years, terminated by a

massive torrent, aligns almost precisely with trends predicted in the

assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Environment Minister Afridi says his government plans to drive that point
home to other nations at climate change talks scheduled for Mexico at the end
of this year.
"We are going to Cancun," Afridi said. "We are looking forward to having a
forum where we can cry in front of those people and have them know what has
happened with us. The world has seen it themselves."
But Afridi also acknowledges that in many ways, Pakistan set itself up for an
even bigger disaster than would otherwise have transpired. Ecological
degradation that he says costs his nation about $1 billion in lost wealth per day
is also partly to blame.
To what extent the 2010 flood disaster was caused by climate change versus
other human impacts is a subject of growing debate in Pakistan.
Next: Part two -- how ecological degradation and neglect made the disaster
far worse.
Saadia Haq contributed to this report.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy
Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500
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