TEN feet. That is how high the water rose in Rawalpindi’s Leh Nullah before dawn broke over the capital last Friday, turning Murree Road and Bhara Kahu into rivers and trapping commuters where they stood. No cyclone made landfall. No unprecedented deluge was recorded. This was an ordinary monsoon downpour and it was enough, once again, to bring Pakistan’s capital to its knees. Before anyone reaches for the phrase “natural disaster,” it is worth being precise. The rainfall was a natural hazard; the disruption that followed was shaped by how the city has been planned, built and managed. This was an entirely foreseeable spell meeting a drainage system, encroached waterways and a planning culture that had four prior summers to prepare and chose, each time, to be surprised instead. Calling that nature’s fault is not humility. It is an alibi.
There is also a physical reason “ordinary” spells now behave like extraordinary ones. A warmer atmosphere holds roughly seven percent more water vapour per degree Celsius of warming, released in short, violent cloudbursts rather than the steadier rain older drainage systems were built for. Islamabad’s infrastructure is calibrated to a climate that no longer exists. That does not excuse four summers of institutional shrugging, but the goalposts have moved. Islamabad does not flood because the sky singled it out. It floods because the city has built, permit by permit, on the assumption that this year’s rain would behave better than last year’s. It never does. Streams that once carried water out of the capital have been narrowed, built over or turned into dumping grounds, while enforcement repeatedly failed to prevent it. Research on the Lower Indus below Kotri Barrage found sediment deposition has cut a river reach’s flood-carrying capacity by close to eighteen percent- a sign of how easily human intervention erodes a river’s ability to handle floods. Islamabad’s own streams face the same pressure, minus the enforcement. Forests on the Murree hills, too, have been stripped of the roots that once held slopes together- witness the building that came down on the Murree Expressway last month, taken out by a landslide on ground weakened by deforestation. Engineering handed over to politics, losing, on schedule, every year.
Here is the harder truth: Islamabad has no excuse of poverty to hide behind. It has the Capital Development Authority, the best-funded, most heavily regulated urban authority in the country and that authority still cannot keep a single suburb dry through one monsoon spell. What does it say about a state’s priorities when its own capital cannot manage the one recurring disaster it has had eight decades to prepare for? The real cost is not the submerged underpass; it is the small business in Gawalmandi that does not reopen, the school day in Bhara Kahu that does not happen, the trust that erodes with each ignored warning. Part of the answer is structural. Drainage, roads, water supply and disaster response sit in separate departments – CD, the Rawalpindi Municipal Corporation, the Cantonment Board – that rarely coordinate before a flood and trade blame after one, treating each storm as an event to survive rather than design around. That is crisis management wearing preparedness as a costume.
Yet Islamabad’s own rulebook proves it knows better. Since a March 2026 directive, CDA has made rooftop rainwater harvesting mandatory for new construction and moved to expand recharge infrastructure. The problem is no longer recognition – it is whether enforcement can reach existing housing stock and scale to match the risk. Other capitals facing identical physics have shown what a serious response looks like. Copenhagen did not answer its catastrophic 2011 flood by laying bigger pipes and calling it solved; it rebuilt its relationship with rain: parks engineered to flood safely, squares that double as reservoirs, tunnels that store and reuse stormwater. The redesign was not cheap, but it treated flood resilience as infrastructure, not emergency expenditure – a single decision, defended for decades, that flooding is a design failure to correct rather than endure.
So what should happen now, before the next spell arrives? First, universalize what Islamabad has already legislated but not enforced: extend the rainwater-harvesting mandate to every commercial and government building. Second, give the waterways legal teeth – declare buffers around Leh Nullah and the capital’s seasonal streams formal no-build zones, with encroachments cleared on a published timeline. Third, end the jurisdictional theatre: merge stormwater planning across CDA, the RMC and the Cantonment Board into one basin-level authority. Residents of Bhara Kahu and Gawalmandi need real-time flood warnings and evacuation protocols – not a press release after the water has already risen. None of this is beyond Islamabad’s means. What it has lacked is the discipline to act on what it already knows before the water rises, rather than mourn what it lost after it recedes. Copenhagen needed one flood to commit to a hundred years of correction. Islamabad has had four and is still waiting for the fifth to teach it the same lesson. It should not need one.
—The writer is a policy analyst and researcher with a Master’s degree in Public Policy from King’s College London.
