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........

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