The Odisha Disaster Management Authority (OSDMA) is now on its way to achieve ‘tsunami-ready tag’ for 328 vulnerable villages of six costal districts.
The capacity building activities to the vulnerable villages would be expanded and the tag would be achieved by fulfilling the 11 parameters set by the Unicef.
Already two villages, namely Baxipali of Ganjam district and Gadaharishpur of Jagatsingpur district have qualified all the parameters. These two villages might get Unicef certificate soon.
After award of the certificate, the two villages would be first tsunami ready villages among 56 nations in the entire Indian Ocean region.
This was discussed in the Governing Body meeting of the OSDMA held here on Friday under the chairmanship of Chief Secretary Asit Tripathy wherein Additional Chief Secretary OSDMA Pradeep Kumar Jena outlined the issues for discussion.
Reviewing the updates for management of natural disasters, Chief Secretary Tripathy directed for proper repair and maintenance of the multipurpose cyclone/flood shelters before June, 2020. Tripathy also directed that the emergency equipment supplied to the shelters should be under the direct charge of the respective fire stations for keeping the machines in good working condition. He further directed to start training activities in State Disaster Management Center already set up in Gopabandhu Academy of Administration.
The center would be used as a temporary training center till completion of the State Institute of Disaster Management (SIDM), now under construction within the campus Revenue Officers Training Institute ( ROTI) at Gothapatana. The SIDM would be a state of art institution with world class training infrastructure, training modules and facilities. Target was set to complete construction of the building by March 31, 2021.
Chief Secretary Tripathy directed to have third party quality audit of the entire SIDM project.
Additional Chief Secretary Jena appraised that physical audits of the multipurpose cyclone/flood shelters have been completed in all 25 districts. At present, a total number of 879 shelters are in operation out of which 503 are Multipurpose Cyclone Shelters (MCS), 311 are Multipurpose Flood Shelters (MFS) and 65 are the MCS constructed by Indian Red Cross Society. It was decided to complete repair works before June, 2020. It was also decided to fix lightning arrester system in all the shelters.
Further, Jena said the OSDMA in collaboration with USA based firm Earth Networks has installed six lightning detection sensors in different parts of the State. The system gives prediction of the lightning about 30 to 45 minutes in advance, he added.
Map based lightning alerts are provided. It was decided that the Earth Networks will do validation of the lightning warnings provided to the OSDMA and would also monitor the lightning incidents on real time basis.