The Hindu : Disaster management control rooms soon in hazard-prone districts

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Dec 28, 2003

Southern States

Southern States - Tamil Nadu

Disaster management control rooms soon in hazard-prone districts

By N. Ravi Kumar

CHENNAI DEC. 27. Chennai, Tiruvallur, Kancheepuram, Cuddalore, Kanyakumari and the Nilgiris, multihazard-prone districts, will soon have a control room each under the natural Disaster Risk Management (DRM) programme.

The control rooms, to be set up by the State Government in association with the Centre under the DRM project of the United Nations Development Programme, will serve as nodal points of contact for the public during earthquakes, floods, cyclones and landslides.

``The proposal is being processed and the State Government is currently looking for equipment. The control rooms will function throughout the year,'' according to the project officer, Urban Earthquake Vulnerability Reduction section of the DRM programme, M. Jaiganesh.

Setting up the control rooms was an essential component of the DRM programme, he told here on Thursday, after delivering a lecture organised by the State centre of the Institution of Engineers on the urban earthquake vulnerability reduction programme. Tamil Nadu was one of the three States to establish a Disaster Management Authority (with the Chief Secretary as the head). Secretaries of 16 departments were members and the Commissioner of Revenue Administration was the `Link Commissioner.'

Noting that Chennai, like most of the urban cities, was vulnerable to devastation in the aftermath of an earthquake, he said one reason for this could be the ``millions of unsafe buildings, particularly those in which the ground floor is used for vehicle parking.'' Such structures tend to collapse faster in the event of a natural disaster, he said, even while underscoring the need for creating public awareness of the potential risks.

As per the urban earthquake vulnerability reduction project, covering 38 cities, including Chennai and Coimbatore (both figure in the moderate risk seismic zone-3 in the latest map of the Bureau of Indian Standards), ``typically, the majority of constructions in these cities are not earthquake-resistant. Thus, any earthquake in one of these cities will turn into a major disaster.'' The 38 cities figured in the seismic zones 3, 4 and 5 and had a population of more than five lakhs each.

The components of the project were to create awareness, develop preparedness and response plans at the community and administrative levels, and capacity building at all levels. It sought to develop a regulatory framework, ``a techno-legal regime,'' to promote safe construction and systems to ensure compliance and enable networking for people living in the cities to ``learn from one another's experience'' and about the best international and national practices in handling such crises.

The focus of the `techno-legal regime' would be to develop systems for city specific audit of safe building practices. It would facilitate financial institutions and insurance agencies to work out modalities to ensure disaster-resistant features for new buildings as well as to incorporate them into existing constructions.

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