Residential colony in ruins

A week ago a rainy spell hit Shah Khalid Colony service road, sending rain barrelling down for several hours. The people of the surrounding colonies saw a tide of brown water creeping up the roadside. The greenish hue of the pre-rain roadside greenery overcame, bit by bit, by the dark, muddy wave of water. Now the water stinks.

“Oh, this is bad. Look at that, a bag full of filth. Whenever I pass by I get depressed with an outcry, “When this service road will get the attention of city fathers,” says Mehdi Zaman Khan from Fazal Town Phase-I.

“Several roads, including those in the main city areas, are in a very bad condition. Their condition seems to have worsened after the spell of heavy rain that the city received last week, but our locality has got a strange feature. Even when the rain stops the problems continue to persist,” adds Mehdi Zaman.

“When it rains in our locality, raw sewage passes in front of our houses and flows directly onto the road. Even a relatively small amount of rainfall overwhelms our aging sewer system and triggers a situation, which discharges the rainwater and raw sewage into our houses and also dots the edges of the roads,” says Tauqeer Haider from Tajabad Colony.

“Besides the human waste, any oil, waste or household garbage that happens to be on the street when a rainfall begins are swept by the flowing street water onto the road and inside the houses. Gutters constitute one of the most heavily contaminated bodies of water in the city and each rainfall adds to the cesspool,” says Rahat Ali from Shah Khalid Colony.

“ The largest category of city’s wastewater infrastructure still needs to be addressed. Just last week, after rain spell dirty water bubbled out of gutters even in trendy neighbourhoods where the low-lying sewer system is increasingly overtaxed as more and more residents move in those areas,” says Samar Hussain.

“The sewers regularly overflow. Any time there’s more than an inch of rain, we regularly have flooding on the street. I am worried what the new real estate development will do to the sewer system. It is just going to increase the load on the infrastructure. There’s going to be more flooding,” says Ghayyur Zaidi from Faisal Colony.

Samad Naqvi Zaidi’s neighbor says: “When too much rainwater is added to the flow of raw sewage, the result is frequently an overflow.