India: National disaster management body to document lessons from Cyclone Fani

By Debabrata Mohanty

Four months after cyclone Fani hit Odisha, the National Institute of Disaster Management is planning to bring out a document on lessons that have been learnt from the disaster.

The super cyclone of 1999 that led to the death of over 10,000 people in coastal Odisha was the most catastrophic natural disaster in the history of the state. Twenty years later, cyclone Fani that hit Odisha coast at Puri on May 3 led to the loss of only 64 people largely due to a massive evacuation of over 1.5 million people, yet caused loss of Rs 24,176 crore, as per a damage and loss assessment report authored by World Bank, Asian Development Bank and various UN agencies.

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Among other lessons, the document on Fani would detail lack of exact recovery plan, how inadequate workforce and ground clearance machineries delayed restoration, unavailability of concrete guidelines for judicious distribution of materials like polythene sheets during immediate relief phase and failure of post-disaster communication.

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NIDM officials, who last week held a workshop, said the one of the focus areas of the document would be on ensuring effective post-disaster communications. Though [the Odisha State Disaster Management Authority] in July last year had operationalised the five layer of communication system under the National Cyclone Risk Mitigation Project involving satellite and terrestrial communication system, all of them failed soon after Fani made a landfall in Puri on May 3.

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