Karachi: Pakistani grave digger Shahid Baloch is taking no chances. Like many people in Karachi, he was caught out by the severity of last summer’s heatwave, which killed more than 1,300 people. He has hired a digger to excavate three elongated trenches big enough for 300 bodies.
“Thanks to God, we are better prepared this year,” said Baloch, 28, who works with three brothers at the vast Karachi cemetery run by the charitable organization Edhi Foundation.
When the heat wave struck in the summer of 2015, hospitals, morgues and graveyards in the city of 20 million people were overwhelmed. Drug addicts, day laborers and the elderly were the biggest victims of the searing heat.
Temperatures hit 44 degrees Celsius (111 Fahrenheit), their highest since 1981 and above normal summer levels of around 37C (99F).
Local authorities said that intervention by the army and charity groups staved off an even worse disaster. Still, the crisis exposed the shortcomings of Pakistani emergency services in coping with environmental disasters that scientists say will become more common in the future.
Pakistan’s meteorological office is not predicting a repeat of last year’s extreme conditions, but, like Baloch in the cemetery, officials are preparing for the worst just in case.
“It will not get out of control the way it happened last year,” said Karachi Commissioner Asif Hyder Shah, adding that nearly 60 hospitals now have spare capacity for 1,850 heat wave patients.
Last summer, patients slept on ward floors, and long queues formed outside Karachi’s main state hospitals at the peak of the heat wave.
Shah said nearly 200 first-response centers had been set up across the city, offering basic heat-stroke treatment to stabilise patients swiftly. There are also 700 makeshift relief centers, dishing out drinking water and rehydration salts.
“This will save lives. It’s a comfort,” said street vendor Muhammad Mahmood, 32, after downing a cup of water at one center. Next to him, children in school uniforms queued to quench their thirst.
Edhi Foundation, at the heart of efforts to limit the suffering caused by the heat wave last year, said it was expanding its huge fleet of ambulances, anchoring extra shelves in its morgue freezer and buying ice machines to keep patients and corpses cool.
Last summer, the Edhi morgue ran out of freezer space after about 650 bodies were brought in a few days. Ambulances left decaying corpses outside in sweltering heat.
UNDER-INVESTMENT HAMPERS PLANS
Similar macabre scenes plagued Karachi’s cemeteries, where grave diggers refused to work in the baking sun and charged up to five times normal rates for burial plots.
“People could not buy those graves,” said Faisal Edhi, managing trustee of the Edhi Foundation. “They buried their dead in their relatives’ graves.”
Efforts to prepare for extreme heat have been limited by decades of under-investment in Pakistan’s crumbling electricity grid and water infrastructure, leaving the sprawling city vulnerable in times of crisis.
The problem last year was compounded by power cuts which left people unable to cool themselves with fans and air conditioners, particularly affecting those unable to afford generators.
