24 more Odisha villages set to become ‘Tsunami Ready’: INCOIS

A view inside a INCOIS lab in Hyderabad on Wednesday.

Twenty four more villages in Odisha are all set to become ‘Tsunami Ready’ in addition to the existing two villages of Venkatraipur and Noliasahi which got the tag four years ago and rest of the coastal States can well follow suit emulating the model, said Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) director T. Srinivasa Kumar on Wednesday.

“Tsunamis may be of a rare occurrence, but in this 20^th year of the December 2004 tsunami (close to 2.3 lakh killed), we need to be prepared constantly revising our Standard Operating Practices (SOPs) as the ultimate goal is to have zero loss of lives in the coastal areas, when such an incident happens again,” he told a gathering of disaster management officials from various coastal States at the institute premises.

A view inside a INCOIS lab in Hyderabad on Wednesday.

The director pointed out that the timeline for issuing early warning for tsunamis is very short — 30 minutes for the Andamans & Nicobar Islands if the quake occurs in the Indian Ocean region and two/three hours to reach the east coast or two/three hours to hit Gujarat coast if the quake occurs in the Markan zone near Iran in the Arabian Sea.

The officials are attending a two-day workshop on ‘Tsunami Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)‘ for the respective disaster management departments of coastal States/Union Territories to get familiarised with the tsunami bulletins, help in improving upon existing SOPs and prepare for the upcoming national mock tsunami exercise on November 5 — World Tsunami Awareness Day.

“We are looking to bridge the gaps in the SOPs because officials keep changing. We are also issuing warnings for high waves and swells, but finally the local authorities should take the message to the last mile and take necessary action like evacuation or not,” he said. Few other coastal villages in Kerala and Gujarat too are said to becoming ‘Tsunami Ready’.

Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre (ITEWC) here can detect any quake of above 6.5 on Richter Scale within three minutes in the Indian Ocean and through a series of buoys, tide gauges, satellite communications, sea bed, topography and others it issues alerts about the threat levels within minutes over a short period of time after making modelling calculations, said scientist Ch. Pathanjali Kumar.

Group director — Ocean Modelling, Applied Research & Services, T. M. Balakrishnan Nair explained about the other INCOIS multi-hazard early warning services like storm surges, ocean state forecasts, high wave alerts, online oil spill advisory service, small vessel advisory & forecast services system, marine heat wave advisories and so on. Scientists J. Padmanabham and B. Ajay Kumar also made presentations.