Govt knew 1hr before waves hit Chennai

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Govt knew 1hr before waves hit Chennai

 

http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=61766

 

Disconnect between agencies: Met runs late, guess where first alert

mistakenly sent? Home of Murli Manohar Joshi!

 

 

SHISHIR GUPTA, SONU JAIN & AMITAV RANJAN

 

 

Posted online: Thursday, December 30, 2004 at 0221 hours IST

 

 

 

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.''

 

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