Two Photos of Kotri Barrage – One Year Apart

Posted on August 27, 2010
Filed Under >Owais Mughal, Disasters, Environment
19 Comments
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Owais Mughal

Following are the two photos of River Indus at Kotri barrage – taken approximately a year apart. In the first photo you can see people walking on the dry Indus bed and second photo is from 2 days ago where the whole barrage structure is under threat due to super flood here.

(1) June 29, 2009 This photo was part of our post on the Indus Day in 2010 where we wrote about depleting Water Resources of Pakistan. Today this photo seems so unreal!

(2) August 25, 2010. Note the tags with our post today as well as the post on Indus Day are ‘environment’ and ‘disasters’ but within 6 months the disaster has menifested itself in such a starkly opposite form.

19 responses to “Two Photos of Kotri Barrage – One Year Apart”

  1. Owais Mughal says:

    As I was writing the series of articles for ATP on Indus highway (N55) – I was also researching the history of towns along Indus highway. It was astonishing to read that town after town along Indus has been destroyed atleast once in the past 200 years when Indus flooded or changed its course e.g. Kashmore, Mithankot, Chachran, Rajanpur, D.I.Khan etc. And not to mention the 5000 year old Moen-jo-Daro. All these cities have been destroyed by Indus once in the past.

    I also read statement by some UN guy few days ago that Pakistan’s loss is so high this time because population lived too close to the river.

    Point is that after floods recede, hopefully the town planners will jump in and rebuilding will happen farther from the river or at higher grounds. Easier said than done because who would want to give away their land? – but then acts of nature like this year are a reminder that sometimes it is hard to tame mother nature.

  2. Owais Mughal says:

    This is just an observation. I clearly remember that up until mid July all provinces were bickering with each other on how other provinces were not giving them their ‘fair’ share of water. I believe there were even couple of resolutions in provincial assemblies demanding more water from other provinces.

    There were talks about abolishing NFC accord altogether.

    So called ‘qaum parast’ parties were having a field day exploiting the situation and now within a month there is so much water in all 4 provinces that it is hard to control.

  3. Owais Mughal says:

    Photo taken by Dr. Awab is indeed very powerful and shows how barely the barrage is withstanding the onslaught of more than 900,000 cusecs. That photo however, is of Sukkur barrage – which most will know is upstream of Kotri and can withstand more water than Kotri barrage.

    At Kotri, the barrage capacity is 600,000 cusecs and news reports indicate that more water has been flowing here for the past few days than 600K cusecs.

    The last time 600K cusecs water flew through Kotri barrage was in 1974. In the past 36 years, this barrage has not seen such onslaught. Add to this the natural fatigue of structure as well as the silting that most definitely must’ve occured here by stopping water for 36 years. I also think not much of dredging has been done to keep the upper channel of Kotri barrage desilted. Expert comments are welcome. My comment about deredging is my assumption. don’t know for sure.

  4. Bangash says:

    All over the world dams are built to store water, generate electricity and reduce the flow rate and volume of floods, except in Pakistan where geniuses like Daud simply declare that dams make no difference in flood control.

  5. Daud says:

    @Zaman.
    Can you please explain what “math” needs to be done?

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