Though the monsoon is towards the end of its season, it waged the brunt of its destruction only over the past weekend, when no less than 50 people were killed countrywide, not just in floods themselves but also in house collapses and electrocutions. People have died all the way from Lahore to Hyderabad, with Shergarh (Okara district), Multan, Dera Ghazi Khan and Muzaffargarh in between also seeing people killed. While it would be against common sense to blame the government for the weather, there are two factors at work. The first is that so many of the deaths were avoidable. The second is that there has been a clear failure of inspection, both in the building collapses and the electrocutions. The inspection failures are all the more remarkable because there has been no freak weather, and so far the monsoon has been well within the parameters of the climate. It is also a relatively simple matter to check whether a building is fit for human habitation for the climate in which it is. Similarly, it is not all that difficult to check electric wires to see whether they will operate properly during the monsoon. If these steps had been duly taken, the monsoon rain would not have had so many victims.There is an unfortunate tendency to regard these deaths as the inevitable cost of living in a monsoon area. Human beings have always modified their environment, and if the right precautions are taken, there is no reason why most of these deaths cannot be avoided. After all, as the recent rains themselves have shown, if a problem is tackled seriously, there is no reason for it not to be solved. The provincial capital of Lahore was so chronically infested by monsoon flooding that it was virtually assumed to be an unavoidable accompaniment to the rains. However, Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s refusal to accept this, and his constant efforts to overcome it, has resulted in there being no flooding with this rain.However, there is a new challenge, that of inspections of buildings to see that they are fit to be lived in. This is not a pre- or post-monsoon activity, but one that must be carried out all year round. As these monsoon rains, and previous efforts, have shown, preparing for the ravages of the monsoon is a never-ceasing activity, which must be carried out all year round if it is to have anything like the desired effect. The alternative to moving out of the monsoon area is to maintain a constant vigilance.