Wild fire

After all the trauma and panic in Lahore on Thursday, we are now told officially that the explosion which killed at least eight people in Lahore’s heavily protected DHA area yesterday, was caused by an accident involving gas cylinders stored in the under-construction building which collapsed after the blast. The hours preceding this news had been filled with wild conjecture, questioning whether this was a terrorist attack, a cylinder accident or even a generator explosion. Actions that seemed to be very deliberate, such as the circulation of WhatsApped, Tweeted or Facebooked messages regarding another blast in the Gulberg area simply added to the uncertainty, terror and panic – in fact inflicting just the kind of damage that terrorists attempt to use to create maximum damage within communities. Now that we have some clarity, we need to question all that happened. In the first place, it is unacceptable that official spokespersons too came up with conflicting accounts of what had happened.

The role played by the mainstream electronic media was unacceptable too. The rumours were taken forward, directly into homes, simply adding to the confusion and impeding the police investigation. We need a more responsible media, more expert handling from officialdom and a more mature response from citizens. Even people shooting footage on their mobile phones while victims lay sprawled on the ground is appalling. It sometimes seems that as a nation we thrive on horror. The plethora of social media messages still going around certainly seems to suggest that. While social media may be difficult to control, the mainstream media at least needs to be persuaded to adopt better standards of reporting and not send out broadcasts to millions of viewers based on mere hearsay or speculation. This having been said, we should not really feel relief that the blast which took so many lives and injured over a dozen others occurred due to cylinders going off. The tragedy does not become less horrific. If anything, it becomes even more so. There is every reason to believe that across our cities, particularly in cities where there is an acute gas shortage such as in Lahore, gas cylinders are often poorly stored without adequate safety precautions. This in itself poses a massive hazard to citizens. There had been photographs earlier this year of gas canisters haphazardly stacked up in closed spaces – including near the area where the tragic incident occurred on Thursday. The extent of the risk such materials present is now before us in the wreckage we see in DHA. This problem may be a harder one to deal with than terrorism. There have been a multitude of other industrial accidents in the past. The lessons, however, are before us and the question is whether we will learn from these in the times ahead.