Officials involved in the disaster management works should themselves reach their designated posts and start discharging their allocated responsibility after feeling tremors from an earthquake. The officials should not wait for any order in such a situation, said Chief Secretary S Ramaswamy. The Chief Secretary said this while presiding over a meeting held to review the mock drill for an earthquake scenario conducted in the State on Tuesday.
The disaster management and rehabilitation department, state administration and National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and ministry of Home Affairs conducted a mock drill of the incident command system (ICS) for an earthquake scenario.
For this purpose, it was presumed that an earthquake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale had been experienced in Uttarakhand at 10:02 AM with its epicenter in Tapovan village in the Joshimath Tehsil of Chamoli district. This was considered to have affected Chamoli, Uttarkashi, Tehri and Dehradun districts. As part of the mock drill, on feeling the earthquake tremors or receiving information about the same from other mediums, employees linked to various units reached the emergency operation centre established at the secretariat and assumed their respective tasks.
Similarly, the district disaster centres in Dehradun, Tehri, Chamoli and Uttarkashi also became active. The police, home guard and various departmental officials reached the pre-marked staging areas with available resources in the ‘affected’ districts. Due to the intensity of the mock quake, the mobile and landline connectivity was supposed to be destroyed, so satellite phones and wireless systems were used to collect information from the districts.
According to the information received from the districts, the police force and State Disaster Response Force personnel were deputed and rescue teams departed to the affected areas where relief camps were set up. The Indo Tibetan Border Police Force (ITBP) and army were also kept on the alert.
Reviewing the exercise later, chief secretary S Ramaswamy said that the traffic department should prepare a list of vehicles to be acquired in such circumstances. Officials of the various linear departments should always be in possession of complete information.
Preparation should also be made for ensuring restoration of the communication network as early as possible in such a situation, he stressed.
The NDMA senior advisor VK Dutta said that the mock exercise had been satisfactory, while adding that arrangements will have to be improved in the staging areas. More focus will also have to be laid on mutual coordination, he said.