India's disaster management capabilities have come up for all-round praise from renowned tsunami and global warming specialist, Dr Tad Murty.
“I would place India's disaster management skills and response mechanism among the top 10 in the world,” Dr Murty, who is on a visit here, told Business Line .
CYCLONE RESILIENCE
The cyclone resilience and storm-surge management protocol may belong to an even more rarefied class of only five or fewer.
Over the past 10 years India has improved manifold its predictive skills relating to atmospheric events over the past 10 years, he said.
Even developed economies are looking to learn from the ‘vertical evacuation' principles (as in cyclone shelters) successfully followed by India.
‘Horizontal evacuation' in the US in the wake of Hurricane Katrina had seen people drive down the highways to safety.
The resulting massive traffic gridlock had only exacerbated the problem.
TSUNAMI ALERT
Dr Murty sought put the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System on a par with its Pacific counterpart, saying the system is already giving a good account of itself.
He agreed that the Arabian Sea was less populated with wave-riding buoys, making for a relatively ‘darker' area compared to the Bay of Bengal. He also did not rule out the possibility of a major quake event in the region adjoining the Makran coast (Pakistan coast) with a likely tsunami threat.
The last tsunami reported here was in 1945; its replication now could cause comparably massive collateral damage and loss of life.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
What seems to worry Dr Murty is the presence of massive infrastructure put up since along the Mumbai and Karachi coasts.
The tens of lakhs of people living in the sprawling slums of Dharavi and other vulnerable areas along the western coast of India presented a nightmare for disaster management authorities.