With the recent 7.2 earthquake off the southern coast of India, Pakistan Met. Department is investing Rs.193 million in upgrading its seismological network toward a Tsunami Early Warning System (TEWS). Current proposal is to install 15 broadband seismic centres, 50 short-band and 50 strong motion seismo-graphics across the vital regions. The data from these systems could be analyzed and processed within a couple of minutes.
In 1945, Balochistan coast was hit with an 8.3 Richter earthquake followed by 40 feet Tsunami waves resulting in 4000 casualties.
While these system will provide an early warning, there should be a public plan in place for an emergency response system detailing evacuation and relief. Say a warning is issued by TEWS and a tsunami is imminent, I don’t see how the people living in say the clifton/defence area would be able to evacuate within a matter of hours, let alone minutes (due to traffic congestion, bad roads, 3 major exit points to the inland, two of them being bridges etc). TEWS is only half the battle and hopefully the government is sensible enough to think two steps ahead.
Also reclaiming land allAlso reclaiming land all over Defence and other parts really doesn’t help. Are we up to Phase XXV yet? There is ample land in North Karachi and West of us and yet we keep spending millions in reclaiming land that we really don’t need to be developing for all, residential, commercial and industrial sectors.