Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Indian government agencies knew an hour before disaster struck

An hour is just too less without the infrastructure. An efficient early warning system can at best give notice a few hours in advance. Is it not time then for a comprehensive disaster management solution ?

Govt got wind 1 hr before waves hit Chennai

Disconnect between agencies: Met runs late, guess where first alert mistakenly sent? Home of Murli Manohar Joshi!

SHISHIR GUPTA, SONU JAIN & AMITAV RANJAN

NEW DELHI, DECEMBER 29 At 7.50 am on Black Sunday, more than one full hour before the tidal waves hit the Tamil Nadu coast, the top brass of the Indian Air Force knew that the Car Nicobar Air Base had been inundated.

But it was only 41 minutes later—during which time the waves were heading west—that the first communique went out from the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) to the Government. And the Crisis Management Group, the Government’s nodal emergency response unit, met at 1 pm by when the tsunami had come, killed and gone.

And guess who got this first IMD communique? It was sent at 8.54 am to the residence of Murli Manohar Joshi, former Science and Technology Minister rather than his successor Kapil Sibal.

It’s always easier to find faults with the benefit of hindsight—especially in an unprecedented disaster like this one—but an investigation of the sequence of events after the quake hit Sumatra at 6.29 am shows a glaring disconnect between different agencies of the Government. And highlights how precious time—that could have been used to issue warnings and maybe save some lives—was lost.

Consider the sequence of events:

• ‘‘At 7.30 am, we were informed by our Chennai unit that coordinates the logistics for the Car Nicobar base about a massive earthquake near Andamans and Nicobar,’’ Air Chief S Krishnaswamy told The Indian Express today.

‘‘But communication links went down in the Island Territories, the Chennai unit could only raise Car Nicobar base on the high frequency set at 7.50 am ... the last message from Car Nicobar base was that the island is sinking and there is water all over.’’

• At 8.15 am, the Air Chief says, he asked his Assistant Chief of Air Staff (Operations) to alert the Defence Ministry.

Now cut to the civilian establishment.

• Unaware of its fax goof-up, the IMD, as per routine, sent another fax to the Disaster Control Room in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) at 9.14 am.

• Eight minutes later, Cabinet Secretary B K Chaturvedi’s private secretary was also brought into the loop.

• At 10.30, the director of the Control Room T. Swami informed Cabinet Secretariat officials.

• By then the tsunami had hit the Chennai coastline and another earthquake measuring 7.3 struck 60 miles west of Indira Point at 9.53 am.

What happened between 6.29 am and 8.56 am in the IMD is also telling: it shows how the country’s premier met agency works in isolation during an unprecedented emergency.

So even as IMD stations in Chennai, Vishakhapatnam and Kolkata began started receiving after-shock signals within minutes of the main earthquake, and while the rest of the world had already issued the exact epicentre of the earthquake—and the Pacific warning system had sounded a tidal wave alert—the IMD was doing its own calculations to find out the magnitude and epicentre of the earthquake.

Not helping the IMD was the fact that the Andaman station in Port Blair runs on an old, analog system rather than a digital one. In other words, in the event of a large earthquake and frequent after-shocks, what it registered was a ‘‘clipped seismograph’’ —a blank sheet of paper instead of zig-zag lines.

This is exactly what happened.

‘‘For computing the exact epicentre, we need data from three stations in three directions. With Andamans out of operations, it took us longer than expected,’’ explained the duty officer.

By then, the after-shocks had begun at Andamans. The first one was at 7:19 am of magnitude 5.9 on the richter scale. It is not clear whether that was enough to sound the warning bells.

‘‘Tsunamis are never recorded in Indian history, so it did not occur to us,’’ said R S Dattatrayam, director seismology at IMD, who arrived after 8.30 am to the station after being informed. ‘‘I don’t recall the exact sequence of events.’’

1 comment:

Nakul Shenoy said...

An insightful article. It is big blunders like these that turn a disaster into a catastrophe.

Can we do better, ever?

Nakul