After the heavens cleared and the lazy muddy began to go back, Nasir Sultan stopped in what used to be the front room of his modest house of 80 square yards in the Shafiq colony, now a disaster soaked with broken furniture, shipyard wood and rough memories. His wife swept the corner mud, while his three children, Areesha, 12, and his younger brothers, Daniyal and Zayan, collected the remains of their school bags, pulp reduced textbooks, pencils floating in puddles.
The Shafiq colony, a densely populated town hidden from the industrial zone in the FB area, is precariously on the banks of the Lyari River. When the recent rain spell hit Karachi on Tuesday, the river swelled with a ferocity that many residents of a long time say they have never witnessed in their lives. The floods rose on the banks, pouring into houses like those of Nasir with devastating force.
The family had just returned from two emergency refuge nights at a nearby government school, where they were rescued and housed by Al-Khidmat. The UC local representatives provided basic foods and supplies, but nothing could prepare them for what they found when they returned.
“My work, the future of my children, everything has gone,” said Nasir, whose small industrial supply trade was eliminated in flooding. He had stored the products in a back room of the house, hoping to deliver next week. “We returned to nothing more than silence and mud.”
Around him, Shafiq Colony is stirring again: people who return, sweep, rescue. But with still fresh trauma and life destroyed, many, like Nasir and his family, are not sure how to start over.
The last monozonic spell that soaked Karachi not only brought the chaos to the Shafiq neighborhood and neighboring neighborhood in the city of Gulberg, left a trace of destruction throughout the city. At least five people lost their lives in rain -related incidents, including electrocutions and wall collapses, while hundreds more had to be rescued from submerged houses and stranded vehicles.
The low areas in the metropolis became river roads during the night, and the already fragile drainage system of the city collapsed under the weight of continuous and implacable rain.
The situation got worse when the torrents of the hill from the Kirthar mountain range, which runs along the western edge of Sindh, went up to Karachi, feeding with the Lyari and Malir rivers. Both rivers, already swollen from urban runoff, rose to record levels.
What began as seasonal rains quickly became an emergency throughout the city and overwhelming neighborhoods such as Shafiq Col Col Col Col Col Col Col Col Col Col Colstero who feel directly on the road to the growing rivers. For residents like Nasir, floods were not just a natural disaster: they were a total erased of stability, security and home.
As a consequence, the scenes in the Shafiq colony looked like a disaster area: mudded lanes, garbage scattered on the roofs and a strong smell of stagnation hanging in the air. In order for the area to be habitable again, the city administration displayed heavy machinery and sanitation equipment to eliminate the thick layers of mud and debris. The excavators and the water pumps worked 24 hours to drain the stagnant swimming pools, while municipal workers, to an ankle in dirt, worked to deactivate sewerage lines and clear access roads.
“We had to act quickly, or families could not have returned for days, maybe weeks,” said Sabir Hussain, vice president of the UC that supervises cleaning. “Water had backed away, but the risk of filth and disease that left was worse.”
Only after the initial cleaning rounds, the authorities began allowing displaced families like Nasir to return, many of them carry little more than plastic bags full of dry clothes and recovered papers, cautiously stomping in houses that no longer felt like their own.
Karachi, a city already marked by a devastation history during the Monzón rains, has now been warned of a new and more dangerous reality. However, experts argue that the city’s chaos lasts during each season of Monzón has less to do with climate change and more a reflection of bad chronic governance marked by corruption, inefficiency and a lack of persistent political will.
The planner and researcher at Urban Muhammad Toheed said that Karachi’s recurrent urban floods is the result of the bad planning that ignored the slope and natural land of the city.
“There would be no doubt of floods in Karachi if their geology and natural drainage were considered in their growth,” he said.
“The drainage drains were strongly invaded and reduced. Their paths were ignored in development projects, which led to generalized floods,” Toheed said.
His concerns about Karachi’s defective urban planning found a strong echo in the comments of the main minister Syed Murad Ali Shah to journalists on Thursday afternoon. In the midst of devastation and chaos caused by the recent rains of the Monzón, CM Shah offered a rare silver lining: a comprehensive master plan for Karachi is now underway with the support of the World Bank.
“The unplanned expansion of the city has created serious problems,” the prime minister acknowledged.
Referring to his recent visit to the banks of the Lyari River, the CM highlighted the difficult situation of those who live in vulnerable areas, saying: “We must find long -term human solutions to the urban challenges of Karachi.”
Posted in Dawn, September 12, 2025
