Morning lessons at the Al-Khair private school in Peshawar had barely started on Thursday when an upper-floor classroom came down onto the room beneath it, and that ceiling caved in too. By the afternoon, hospital and rescue officials put the death toll at no fewer than 29, nearly all of them pupils aged 13 or under, along with at least one teacher. Over 50 people were hurt, several critically.
Reaching the victims was its own struggle. The building sits on a lane in Dir Colony so tight that vehicles can only pass one at a time, and fears that the remaining walls might fail kept heavy machinery at bay. Neighbours were first on the scene, digging with shovels until emergency crews, police and army personnel took over. Lady Reading Hospital declared an emergency, and rescuers later said nobody was left under the debris.
Attention has turned quickly to how the school was built. An emergency official described the premises as a makeshift structure, partly two and partly three floors high, and the collapsed rooms reportedly had prefabricated slabs rather than a reinforced concrete roof. Local reports also point to excessive loads. The city police chief said the owner has been arrested and called the structure weak, while a provincial committee is investigating whether safety rules were broken.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa governor Faisal Karim Kundi has ordered every school in the province to be checked for structural risks, saying children must never be put in danger. Condolences came from the very top: both the president, Asif Ali Zardari, and Shehbaz Sharif, the prime minister, voiced their sympathy, and Zardari urged that classrooms across Pakistan be held to proper building standards.
Sadly, the disaster fits a familiar pattern. Pakistan sees frequent building failures, largely because construction codes are weakly enforced and builders cut corners on materials. A tutoring centre near Lahore lost its roof earlier this year as well. For families in Peshawar, the hardest question is why so many children were packed into a building that apparently could never carry their weight.
