Drain lake by March or wait for another year

GILGIT (Express Tribune) : The 23-kilometre-long landslide-triggered lake at Hunza needs to be drained by March 2011 or the increased water inflow will delay the expansion of the spillway by another year, an NGO official warned on Sunday.

People living in Gojal Tehsil, upper Hunza, have been badly affected by the formation of the lake. More than 27,600 people were internally displaced in Hunza and Nagar in the wake of the disaster, according to a recent update of Pakistan Red Crescent Society (PRCS).

Major (retd) Mirbaz, who is the chairperson of PRCS in Gilgit, toldThe Express Tribune that there was enough time to completely drain the lake by March. “If not completed, then we will have lost yet another opportunity of draining it,” he said.

Earlier in November, Muhammad Ali Akhtar, the G-B finance minister, had said that the lake will be drained by March next year, which will enable people living in camps to return to their houses. However people involved in the drainage work believe the pace of work is slow and do not think the work will end in time.

In January this year, a massive landslide had formed a dam in the Hunza River. The Attabad village was completely buried and 19 people died in what was the worst disaster in G-B’s history. The landslide also blocked the Karakoram Highway cutting off about 25,000 people living in upper Hunza Valley.

The debris blocked nearly two kilometres of the once fast-flowing Hunza River, and created a lake that consumed upstream villages as it expanded. The immediate concern for the government was to create spillways so that the bank does not break. Otherwise the resulting flash-flood would have washed away the downstream villages. The spillway was completed in June but the lake is still not fully drained.

Mirbaz said that if the government had allowed the local people to remove the debris that has blocked Hunza River the result would have different today. “I am sure that people of Hunza and Gojal would have assembled there and removed the debris at their own,” he said, adding that the lake would continue to affect the lives of people in the region if work on the spillway was not expedited.

The PRCS head criticised the government for its slow response earlier in the year. He said the flow of water in the river was very little at the time disaster struck Attabad. He added that the depth and width of the spillway dug by the Frontier Works Organisation engineers was not enough to let the water gush out.

Major Mirbaz recalled how his trained volunteers rushed to the disaster scene, retrieving bodies and injured from the debris. The Pakistan Red Crescent Society, he said, had trained more than 4,500 volunteers in G-B to deal with natural calamities.

The society, however, could have done much more if it was not facing a shortage of funds, he said.

“Unless we have full-fledged offices in all the districts we cannot react timely and provide relief to victims in times of disasters,” he said. The society currently employs 70 people in its offices across PRCS. However the society has not even been able to acquire land for a permanent office in G-B.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 15th, 2010