As you may know there was a strong earthquake that jolted Lahore and surroundings around 5PM today.
Quake was pretty scary as it made strange noise like the ground is cracking open.
Immediately everyone rushed to TV channels and internet to find about what really had happened.
As one would expect, TV channels were showing the “templates” that there has been an earthquake and people came out of houses reciting Kalma etc, with no real information.
Mysteriously, US Geological Survey website didn’t record the earthquake as it had no info on the jolts. It is in fact still not displaying any earthquake in Lahore’s vicinity.
Check below map from US Geological Survey website yourself; it has no indication of any earthquake during past 24 hours.
This is when we Googled Pakistan Meteorological Department website and upon opening we found an HTML website that had countless missing images and broken links.
It also had a press release from 2012 about an earthquake on the home page, just to give you an idea on how quick and efficient they are.
Ignoring all this, when clicked on “Latest Earthquakes” it took us to a new website PmdNmcc.net that had its domain EXPIRED!
The Whois data of this domain name revealed that it is registered to some Mr. Hammad Ali from Karachi. The domain was expired on 16th of this month and was first registered in 2007.
So technically, Pak Met Office forgot to renew the domain, or even worse they probably forgot that they had a domain and website for Earthquake updates.
For now the domain name is locked, and soon it is going to be made available for sale again. We hope that Pakistan Met Office will act before they lose the domain forever.
This whole incident is clear indication of how efficient this department is and how competent are the individuals working there.
Not to mention, there’s millions of rupees in budgets for Pak Met Office every year.
It also merits mentioning that recent report from BBC revealed that Pakistan has probably the worst and oldest technology for Met department. The computers there don’t work and ones that work are kept shut down for ever.
No wonder why no one trusts their weather forecasts and moon sightings.
