This article is written by Heart Kins for PWP from Karachi city, Sindh, Pakistan
On 23rd June 2007 as usual I opened satellite image for checking weather and was happy to see a slight cloud formation near Thatta around eastern skies of Karachi. It has been raining consecutively for the past two days or so due to pre monsoon currents entering lower Sindh. Just after 1.5 hours or so the cloud spread towards Southern side as well which became obvious from the new satellite image. At that time I went to the roof top of my house to check if the clouds were visible on Karachi skies by naked eye. What I observed on sky that there was a lot of haze and some thick cirrus clouds in southern side with seemingly no visible features or pattern. In street language it can be termed as a whiteness of sky. The whitened cirrus clouds keep on moving towards our city as satellite image also indicated the fact that the clouds have started to cover Karachi. The whiteness soon enveloped Karachi skies and Sunlight got extremely dimmed. With the passage of time, whiteness converted into thick grey clouds. Half an hour more and the clouds converted into a good dark mass of cumulus in south. It was around time of 4:00 PM or may be 4:30 PM when a distinct rain line/patch formed in lower level around south eastern sides started moving towards us. As usual I was in cheerful frame of mind with some of my cousins wanting to enjoy the rain on roof top as we used to do previously. However, things did not go as planned, wind mood changed quickly, a never seen before experience was in front of our eyes. It was terrible, indeed terrible encounter those fast winds that have started blowing make me and my cousins extremely worried. Seriously for one moment I thought it might be the last moment of my life as the wind will blow everything. It continued blowing for odd 10 minutes before getting a little weaker. After half an hour or so, everything settled down. But Karachi only got light rain on that day. But the cyclonic wind has already done its damage. In after reports, I came to know that at least 213 people got died and many got injured due to wind speed of almost 111 km/h.
On the same day I asked myself what happened to the normal monsoon rains??? How they become so aggressive??? Was that a normal monsoon or some cyclone in Arabian Sea?? Why I remained uninformed about these probable cyclone in Arabian Sea, I have a lot of questions in my mind and nothing were answered by regional metrological department IMD, neither PMD (as far as I know) gave any warnings of cyclone before?? The city was no more the same, every other billboard was damaged, trees uprooted, even the small boards on which streets name were written also got damaged.
Now a background of what happened, the rains which I took as normal monsoon rains were actually coming from a deep depression area which later converted into a tropical cyclone named as Yemyin. The cyclone formed as deep depression area and made its landfall in somewhere around south east Indian coast at Bay of Bengal, it kept on moving towards west north-west and entered open sea waters again i.e. into Arabian Sea. The depression then reorganizes into a category 1 cyclone which was later named as Yemyin and made landfall near Pasni in Baluchistan province.
As I am writing this story another low pressure area is forecasted to form sometime around next week and later on forecasted to move towards central India. Whether it repeats the track of cyclone Yemyin or not it’s too early to say but one thing about which I am clear at least is that I would never like the repetition of that terrible experience though I am a rain enthusiastic person.
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