January 08, 2022 – the day when a delightful winter scene in Murree turned into a national tragedy. More than 22 tourists died due to extreme weather conditions – a mishap one would have seldom imagined in their wildest dreams. During the times when the government boasts about the booming tourism in Pakistan, it is indeed oxymoronic to see such occurrences where people die miserably in a famous hill station of the country chiefly due to unavailability of basic facilities writes Elsa Imdad Hussain.
The tragedy, however, was not sudden. Years of negligence and rampancy on part of the administrative authorities engineered throughout to make it happen. Let us have a categorical look at how it could have been avoided:
The weather had remained cold due to massive rain. Despite that, no warning sign was issued to the general public by the meteorological department or media channels. Besides, every city has a municipal administration whose sole job is to handle the matters of the city, for instance infrastructure monitoring, disaster management, etc. Both PDMA and NDMA have exhibited utter ineptitude in handling the only thing they were founded for: disaster management.
Murree has a parking capacity of 35000 vehicles, but during the past week 150,000 vehicles entered the town, out of which only 135,000 made it out safely while the others remained stuck. When the town had reached its limit of parking capacity, the city authorities should not have allowed the influx of tourists. It could have been much easier for the administration to bear the wrath of returning, upset tourists than to be rightly blamed for the loss of several innocent lives.
Cellular companies use the ‘geotagging’ feature, which means that they can easily figure how many of their network subscribers are in a particular area. Each time a network user changes his/her location, the network gets notified of his/her whereabouts. If the government works in close collaboration with mobile phone companies, calamities as such could be handled better in the future.
Moreover, the hotel prices soared overnight. Instead of monetizing people’s miseries, the hotel owners could have shown a little bit of compassion and lent a helping hand. These are the times when nature tests one’s conscience and the essence of humanity lies in what one can offer to his/her fellow beings, especially when they are in hot water. Sadly, we have failed nature’s test in a mortifying way.
It would not be inapt to infer that apart from the logistical and technical loopholes which paved the way for this tragedy, there is one more thing we are deficient in: empathy. With some competence, appropriate planning, and realization of the magnitude of such tragedies, the government can mitigate the aftermath of such natural hazards, but human values cannot be taught, imposed, or injected. We all, the government and the common people, must ‘choose’ to do the right thing.
Elsa Imdad is a USG Alumna. She holds a bachelors in modern languages with an English major and Spanish minor. She has previously been part of American Spaces in Pakistan and now works as a Project Coordinator at Afghan Studies Center, CRSS. Her interests include public diplomacy, language teaching, peace and conflict resolution, capacity building of marginalized groups, etc.Â
