Karachi's Corridor Holds Through the Worst of August — One Dry Monsoon From Not Holding

KARACHI — For seven days the thermometer refused to fall below body temperature after dark, and for seven days the taps in eastern Karachi ran anyway. That is the headline, and in a city that spent three months of last summer on a rationing schedule, it is an extraordinary one. The Makran desalination corridor — the coastal spine of pipe and pumps that came online in the spring — carried the city through the heat dome's worst week without a single scheduled cutoff in the districts it reaches. In the courtyards, water on demand has stopped feeling like a miracle and started feeling like a right, which is exactly what worries the people who run it. "Do not write that Karachi has solved its water," said hydrologist Farida Qadeer, who has spent a career being right about droughts. "Write that the corridor held. Those are different sentences." The margin, she explained, is thinner than the steady taps suggest: the plant is running near capacity, the aquifer beneath the city is still falling, and every liter the corridor delivers is a liter the next dry season must also find. "We are one dry monsoon from being back where we started," she said — the same sentence she offered in the spring, unchanged, because nothing has happened to change it. This week the city breathed. Qadeer is already watching the sky.