Odisha-Born NDRF DG Bats For Disaster-Resilient Towns To Evade Cyclones

Odisha-born Satya Narayan Pradhan, who is now the National Disaster Relief Force’s director-general, has said that advance warning about Fani would not have helped evade the disaster that Odisha is facing now.

A 1988-batch Jharkhand-cadre senior IPS officer, Pradhan recently told the Economic Times that what Odisha needs most now is to build disaster-resilient towns. Such towns, he explained, have underground cables and wind directional hoardings. “It would mean poles of a certain level which will not bend during a cyclone. It will mean planting trees which will not get uprooted. It is time for us to think about disaster-resilient coastal cities.”

Talking of damage wrecked by Fani, he said communication lines, power supply and water had been the worst hit. He told a television channel that Puri town, Bhubaneswar town, Khurda town and nearby villages were the worst hit. While water supply would be restored in a few days, telecom lines would be up in a week and mobile connectivity too has been partially restored. The problem, he told Economic Times, lies in restoration of power lines, the major obstacles being uprooted trees, as they have power lines wrapped around them. “It will take a week to 10 days to come close to near normal power supply,” he said.

Asked how Fani was different from cyclone Hud Hud or Palin, he said the principal differentiating point was that Fani hit in peak summer, whereas most other cyclones have hit the state in October or November. “When a cyclone develops 800 miles south of the Equator and hits the coast of Odisha, it has built into a system that is laden with moisture,” he said. “The second (differentiating point) is that half of the cyclonic eye went over land and half of it was in the sea. Because of the heat differential and being more moisture-laden, it hit harder.” He also said that the cyclone passed parallel to the coastline but covered half of the coast. It was half inside and half in the sea. “If you drew the line, you could see that there is a bulge starting from south of Puri near Chilka. There is a bulge in land mass up to Balasore and above. These are built up and that’s why there was so much damage.