LAHORE: A woman was killed and two men from her family were injured when the roof of their house collapsed in the Bhati Gate area of Lahore’s Walled City on Thursday, the latest death in a year that has shown how little the city knows about its unsafe buildings.
Police said three members of one family were trapped under the debris at Ghatti Sheesh Mahal. The woman, identified as Nadia, was found dead. The two men were pulled out alive and taken to hospital.
What brought the roof down has not been established. There is no official word on the age or condition of the house, whether neighbours had complained about it, who owned it or whether anyone was negligent.
One fact about the timing is on record. Two days earlier, as rain was forecast across Punjab, the provincial disaster authority’s director general publicly urged people not to stay in dilapidated or mud houses. The Walled City, among the oldest and most tightly packed quarters of Lahore, has many homes that fit that description.
The pattern is easier to see than the cause. In three days at the turn of July, three roofs fell in the city. At a tuition centre in Kahna, where about 35 pupils were in class, 14 students died. Two days later a school roof gave way during a summer camp in Baghbanpura, killing an eight-year-old boy and injuring four workers. Hours after that, a 13-year-old girl died on Raiwind Road when a roof built on iron girders collapsed.
Each incident was followed by a rescue operation. None, so far as the public record shows, was followed by a published list of buildings judged dangerous in the same locality.
That is the information residents need. How many structures inside the Walled City have been declared unsafe, when Ghatti Sheesh Mahal was last surveyed, whether notices were served on owners and what became of them are questions for the municipal authorities, the Walled City administration and the rescue service.
There are signs of closer scrutiny where the state is the builder. The city’s commissioner has been checking the quality of material in classrooms under construction at 73 government schools. Privately owned houses, where most of these deaths occur, have no comparable inspector.
Nor do they have an obvious place in the city’s new complaints system, whose announced categories are sanitation, manholes, encroachments and streetlights. A cracked roof is not on the list.
Until the cause is known it would be wrong to assign blame. It is not too early to ask who is counting.
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