Islamabad floods.

It seems that the real estate mafia can literally get away with murder. The flash flood in Islamabad on Wednesday followed Tuesday's rain, and apart from getting into the basement of houses and seeping away a number of vehicles, managed to kill a mother and a son, who were trapped in the flooded basement of the house in which they lived. The two dead do not compare with the 221 killed this year in Europe, but the cause indicates that the tragedy was avoidable. Local residents have said that there had been encroachment on a nullah, thereby preventing the draining of floodwater, and letting it get into residential basements.

The E-11 sector was developed by private housing developers, not the Capital Development Authority, but the CDA was still responsible to ensure that planning requirements were met, that standards were obeyed. However, real estate developers are good at putting heads together with planning authorities, to the mutual profit of both. The Islamabad tragedy is eerily similar to the reason given last year for Karachi's flooding, of encroachment on drainage channels. That was followed by an...