Corona Diaries 22: Amphan Amid Covid-19 – Just How Much Can A State Handle?

A cyclone amid the gruelling effort to contain the spread of COVID-19 — that’s a double whammy for Odisha. Super cyclone Amphan may have reserved the worst for the region between Digha in West Bengal and Hatia Island of Bangladesh but coastal districts of the state are likely to take a severe lashing.

The Category 5 hurricane has lost some intensity and is an extremely severe cyclone now, according to the weatherman. But that is no cause for relief for the district administrations which have to prepare for the worst-case scenario during and after the cyclone. They had evacuated as many as ten lakh people to safe places before cyclone Fani made landfall in April last year. They are at it again. It is an enormous job.

This cyclone, warns National Disaster Response Force, can get worse than the super cyclone of 1999. Fani was bad, but this is something else, they say. For a people by now used to cyclones, the degree of severity may not make much difference, but the effort at rebuilding life again and again may have become an energy-sapping affair.

Imagine all this happening in the middle of another crisis! These districts are grappling with the problem of returnee migrants, many of whom are COVID-19 positive. They have to be settled in quarantine facilities and provided attention of all kind. What if the cyclone damages these centres? What if flooding waters cut off the supply network? When people panic what happens to social distancing? No Plan B could have factored in a devastating cyclone. The state is faced with an unenviable task.

The only solace is the government’s disaster response mechanism has stood up to great challenges earlier. It has not let people down. It would, one hopes, be equal to the task this time too.

THE FANI NIGHTMARE

The sight was scary. Stunted trees flanked the dark stretch of roads. Loose, lifeless cables hung close to the ground or rested on it. Shanties, a stone’s throw from the main roads, carried a devasted look. Many apartment complexes had windows ripped or their glass smashed. A few uprooted electric poles still remained on the ground and a few stood with bodies contorted at odd angles. It was not a pretty picture at all. This was after a week cyclone Fani struck. By then, the authorities had cleaned up a major chunk of the debris from the city and made it look much saner.

It was worse than the cyclone of 1999 for residents of Bhubaneswar, informed those who had the experience of that one. Because the site of its landfall was much closer to the capital city and the windspeed was nearly the same, or possibly higher, as that of the super cyclone.

If this was the scene in Bhubaneswar, how was it Puri, which took the sledgehammer hit, and the districts bordering it? The pictures of horror from the worst-hit areas had been on television and newspapers. Captured a couple of days after the cyclone-strike, they were good enough to spook any normal person. But they were mostly from fringes of the areas affected; it certainly was scarier in places not accessed by cameras and data service.

NATURE, THE MAD ARSONIST

The Nature plays the angry arsonist quite too often in the state, pegging it back by several years each time. If it is Amphan this time and was Fani a year ago, five years ago it was Hud Hud, and Phailin in 2013. Smaller cyclones and annual floods fill in the blank spaces and keep the disaster calendar active.

Experience has made us the most disaster-ready state in the country. Full credit to the government for minimising human casualties from the raging winds and rampant waters — more than 10,000 lives were lost in 1999; it was less than a 100 in 2019. But that is small solace given the periodic nasty blow to the civic infrastructure and the economy in general.

According to government estimates, the annual financial burden on the state from natural calamities, including cyclones, cyclonic rains, droughts and floods, is a whopping Rs 3,400 crore. The financial loss in the last 25 years is a mind-boggling Rs 85,000 crore. Fani left a bill upward of Rs 9,000 crore for the state to settle by way of rebuilding. The latter can only do damage control in terms of lives saved, but it can hardly do much about the damage to the civic infrastructure built over decades, and to crops and livestock. Perhaps technology will intervene at some point to make its task easier. Till then Odisha will have to grin and bear the pain.

THE CURSE OF SISYPHUS

Odisha, it appears, is cursed to be like Sisyphus of the Greek mythology. Tasked with carrying boulder to the hilltop, he pushed it up the hill with great effort and then watched it roll down to the starting point. He had to begin all over again. By the time the state gets over one disaster and sets its eyes to more important tasks ahead, another strikes. It comes back to the same effort again.

Ancient Odisha, according to historians, was great maritime power. It had a powerful navy and was the lord of the seas. The military power drew strength from flourishing maritime trade. It had great ports and attracted international traffic. The decline, some historians believe, set in due to sudden frequency in cyclones. Besides causing severe physical damage to port infrastructure, they altered sea routes. Nothing much appears to have changed through centuries.

Right now, let’s pray our disaster response system handle the twin challenges of corona and cyclone well.