WHEN Cyclone Gaja made landfall near the coastal town of Vedaranyam in Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu in the early hours of November 16, with sweeping gales and torrential rains, the State government thought that it was well prepared to deal with the cyclone and its aftermath. Ever since the Regional Centre of the India Meteorological Department in Chennai issued a red alert on November 14 on the formation of an intense circular storm in the Bay of Bengal, 510 kilometres east-north-east off Nagapattinam and 430 km east-south-east off Chennai, the State had put its disaster management administration on high alert, issuing mandated precautions in vulnerable pockets of coastal districts. Nearly 50,000 people were evacuated and moved to emergency camps prior to the storm in Nagapattinam, Thanjavur and Tiruvarur districts.
However, the administration and its officers did not reckon with the cyclone’s weird behaviour. After making landfall between 12:30 a.m. and 2:30 a.m. with a wind speed of 110-120 km per hour and a one-metre-high ingression of seawater with slush in coastal pockets, the cyclone devastated interior districts without losing its ferocity before making a brief halt inland in Dindigul district, some 300 km away from its landfall location. The next day it weakened into a depression and crossed to neighbouring Kerala through Theni district before settling in the Arabian Sea.
The cyclone system with torrential rain was so intense that it did not spare even the hill station of Kodaikanal in Dindigul district, which remained cut off for three days. Four road workers in the hill station were buried alive after the shelter they were staying in was crushed by a rain-induced landslide. The storm devastated Nagapattinam, Tiruvarur, Pudukkottai and Thanjavur districts and parts of Tiruchi, Dindigul, Karur, Sivagangai and Ramanathapuram districts of Tamil Nadu and Karaikal in the Union Territory of Puducherry.
There was a sigh of relief in the government following initial reports that the storm had crossed without effecting major losses. The first five hours after landfall had not suggested any serious damage, nor was any adverse report recorded. The loss of lives, according to preliminary reports, was limited to two.
The cyclone saw a rare change in the State’s political culture, with leaders, including M.K. Stalin, leader of the principal opposition party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), congratulating the government on its “effective handling” of the situation.
However, it was a completely different story of accusations and counter-accusations the next day, when the enormity of the tragedy unfolded along with reports of the State’s alleged laxity in relief works.
On November 16, Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami chose to stay put in Salem, his native district town, attending a series of ribbon-cutting events and public functions. He addressed the media around noon to announce that the death toll in the storm had reached 11. He assured the people that everything was under control. But that was not to be. The gross miscalculation about the storm system’s severity was exposed when reports began pouring in from the affected areas.
The Chief Minister, who met the media again in Salem on November 17, said that the storm had left 33 dead and that 2,000 heads of cattle had perished in the cyclone, which had also uprooted 1.72 lakh trees and damaged 30,000 electric poles. A total of 2.49 lakh persons were sheltered in relief camps, he added.
He also said that he had asked his Ministers to go to the affected places to supervise relief operations and that he would visit the affected areas the next day. However, he did not venture out.
His assessment on that day was that the “number of deaths and losses might go up” and he was right. With updated inputs, he met the media in Salem on November 18. Quoting from a tentative report submitted to the Central government, the Chief Minister put the death toll at 45. The cyclone had totally damaged 56,942 huts, partially damaged 30,404 huts, and affected 30,326 tiled houses, 39,938 electric poles, 374 distribution transformers and 3,559 km of power lines. It had also destroyed 88,000 hectares of standing agricultural and horticultural crops, including paddy (32,706 hectares), plantain (4,747 ha), mango (945 ha), cashew (3,253 ha) and coconut (30,100 ha).
He revised the estimate of losses for the fourth time on November 19, but this time in Chennai after chairing a Cabinet meeting. He put the death toll at 46. The revised figures, he said, included the loss of 231 cows, 20 bulls, 19 calves, 1,181 goats and sheep and 14,986 poultry birds, 4,844 damaged fishing boats, 86,702 uprooted electric poles, and 841 damaged transformers and 201 sub-stations. A total of 2.51 lakh people were accommodated in 514 relief camps, he said, and announced an interim relief package of Rs.1,000 crore.
The Chief Minister, Deputy Chief Minister O. Panneerselvam and Chief Secretary Girija Vaidyanathan made an aerial survey of the affected areas of Pudukkottai and Thanjavur districts the next day. However, they had to abort their survey halfway owing to “inclement weather”.
Stalin called the aerial exercise an eyewash and said that the Chief Minister should have gone by road to meet those affected.
Palaniswami did visit Nagapattinam and Tiruvarur districts by road on November 28, 12 days after the devastating cyclone.
After farmers and other people affected by the cyclone raised banners of protest at various places across the Cauvery delta districts alleging that the rescue and rehabilitation measures were tardy, the Chief Minister dispatched a team of senior IAS officers comprising J. Radhakrishnan, Gagandeep Singh Bedi, K. Baskaran, Sunil Paliwal and P. Amudha, to the districts with the mandate of monitoring and coordinating relief work. It was total chaos until then, with the administration at the local level remaining clueless on carrying out relief work, although K. Satyagopal, Commissioner of Revenue Administration, maintained that but for the swift evacuation the casualty count would have gone up.
'Everything is destroyed'
By then, the State’s pre-cyclone preparedness had paled into insignificance after its gross failure in the post-cyclone execution of rescue and rehabilitation work. Moorthy, a resident in a village near Vedaranyam, told Frontline over phone that the Ministers, with their “empty claims” in the media, had aggravated the volatile situation. “People knew that for the first four days the government had carried out little relief operations. Hence, their reaction was aggressive,” he added.
He said that he had lost most of the coconut trees on his five-acre farm. He and other coconut farmers lost two decades of hard work in the cyclone. “It will take another 20 years for us to see the first yield. Only our children might be there to see that. We are not very sure of recovering in the near future. How will we feed our families until then? The coconut farmers must be given a minimum of Rs.3 lakh an acre as compensation. Otherwise we will be doomed,” he said.
Farmers and others, who lost everything from houses and cattle to crops, were angry with the State, which they believe failed them. Schoolchildren lost their uniforms, books and notebooks. The ravaged Cauvery delta districts are already under severe stress due to a water dispute and the forced implementation of non-agrarian projects such as the hydrocarbon extraction project. Trapped in debt and reeling under frequent crop losses, the traditional inhabitants of the delta today remain unsure of their future.
These farmers’ pent-up frustrations exploded through angry protests, gheraos and road blockades in the cyclone-hit districts. The villagers of Alankadu near Muthupettai, where the majority of the population is employed as agricultural labour, pooled all available resources from every household and cooked community meals in the middle of the road. “Until November 23, no one from the government visited us,” said Amudha, a resident. “We exhausted everything and are now waiting for assistance from volunteers,” she added.
Fishermen of Eripurakarai near Pattukottai lost 80 per cent of their boats, houses and belongings. The residents of Pinnathur village in Tiruvarur district, who lost their houses, took asylum in the cremation ground.
These villages are just a few examples of the widespread suffering in the districts. Even 10 days after the cyclone struck, many villagers had not received any assistance. It must be noted that the failure of the State to conduct local body elections had in fact worsened the situation. “Had local body representatives been there, the relief and enumeration work could have been carried out smoothly and on time,” said a revenue official in charge of a block in Tiruvarur. With no ward member or councillor, the vital last link between the State and the people was missing.
Vedaranyam MLA and Handloom Minister O.S. Manian, who went to visit a cyclone-hit village, was forced to abandon his vehicle and ride a motorcycle to escape the fury of the public. R. Vaithilingam, MP of All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), and some Ministers too faced such hostile reception. Irate people damaged the cars of officials in Kothamangalam village in Pudukkottai district in protest against “no power and no relief”. The police used brute force before arresting about 100 villagers in a house-to-house search operation. The Chief Minister had to appeal for calm on more than one occasion so that relief operations could go on unhindered.
But it was an onerous task for the team of senior officials from Chennai to put in place a solid operational mechanism for coordination among various agencies for relief and rehabilitation measures. Two logjams that hampered the relief operations were power failure and road blockades as hundreds of trees and power poles were strewn across the roads. People who had been without food and water for 48 to 72 hours since the cyclone struck could not be reached. Many people survived the first three days on just water and food that volunteers managed to provide. The State started reaching out to them only after four days or so.
Power disruption
“The situation worsened because of the total power failure and its delayed restoration,” said Kirubakaran, a relief volunteer in Vedaranyam, the worst-hit coastal town. He added: “In three days, from November 17 to 20, we ran some 50 sorties of essentials in minivans from Tiruchi.”
Like him, several volunteers rendered yeoman service to help the affected before the official machinery geared up to meet the exigencies. “First we needed hundreds of electric saws, axes, earth movers and other implements, besides enormous manpower, to clear the debris to erect fallen poles and fix snapped transmission lines in towns, villages and hamlets,” an official said. Power supply remained affected from November 15, the day before the cyclone made landfall.
With no electricity, the motor pumps of comprehensive water supply schemes, borewells and irrigation wells could not be operated, as a result of which people in interior pockets remained without potable water for about four days. The relief teams could provide only a few generators in the first five days of the disaster.
“It is a massive problem, which we have never encountered in the disasters of the past such as Ockhi and Thane cyclones. The affected areas then were confined to a few kilometres of a particular land mass, so power could be restored in a day or two,” said an assistant engineer of the Tamil Nadu Generation of Electricity and Distribution Corporation (TANGEDCO) who worked as a relief officer after these cyclones. It was difficult to remove a damaged pole and erect a new one in an inaccessible and slushy field where machines could not be operated, he said.
The State has the unenviable task of restoring within a month a power system that has been established over six decades. Besides a strong force of 21,000 workers and officials from TANGEDCO, an additional team of 400 workers from the Kerala State Electricity Board was participating in the massive restoration operation. Andhra Pradesh chipped in with poles to replace the broken ones. A total of 70,000 posts were to be procured from neighbouring States. Besides, 600 earth movers, 141 electric saws, 60 lorries and 65 tractors were deployed to remove the fallen trees, for which 2,000 workers were employed.
The massive relief operations also involved hundreds of conservancy workers from across the State. After 10 days, power was restored in phases in towns and villages. Some 60 per cent of areas in towns such as Aranthangi, Mannargudi, Pattukottai, Thalaignayiru, Thiruthuraipoondi, Vedaranyam and Adiramapattinam, and 30 to 40 per cent of the villages in affected areas, were covered. Full-fledged restoration of power supply was expected in another 20 days. Realising the gravity of the situation, the government sanctioned Rs.200 crore towards power restoration works.
Power restoration was the only visible work the State undertook during the initial phase of rehabilitation. The Chief Minister met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on November 22 and sought a Central aid of Rs.14,910 crore for restoration works. A Central team headed by a Home Department official, Daniel E. Richard, also visited the cyclone-hit districts for assessment. Meanwhile, the death toll had risen to 63 at the time of going to press.
The State also issued a fresh communique revising the damage and losses. As many as 11.32 lakh trees had been uprooted, of which 7.27 lakh were cleared. Around 3.78 lakh people were moved to 550 relief camps while 1.03 lakh electric poles were either uprooted or damaged. Health Minister C. Vijayabaskar said that four lakh people were given medical treatment. A total of 372 medical camps and 1,014 mobile medical units were pressed into service. He announced that there would be no fees for those who underwent scans, including MRI scans, in government hospitals in the affected districts.
Fishermen also suffered heavy damage. As per the initial estimate collected from the districts of Nagapattinam, Tiruvarur, Pudukkottai, Thanjavur, Cuddalore and Ramanathapuram, 4,844 fishing boats, 5,550 fishnets and 5,727 motor engines were damaged.
The cyclone did not spare wild animals either. According to reports from the Forest Department, 11 blackbucks and one spotted deer, apart from a few birds, died in the wildlife and bird sanctuary at Point Calimere in Nagapattinam district.
Shrimp farms were also affected. “The loss has to be assessed. The shrimps were ready to be harvested,” a source said. Many wondered why the State had not asked for airdropping of essentials in the affected areas where the roads remained blocked. “They could have sought aerial support from the Navy and the Air Force in the first two days to drop food, water, milk and tarpaulin sheets,” said Kalifullah, a mason in Adiramapattinam.
Gagandeep Singh Bedi, who had been camping in the affected areas since November 14, told Frontline that all options to reach out to the people were studied. “It was better to reach the people by road than through air for logistical reasons such as strong winds and torrential rains. We resorted to such drops in the past,” he said. He said that the experience gained from the tsunami of 2004 and cyclones such as Ockhi and Thane had enabled officials to place an effective disaster management system in order as soon as possible. “Massive manpower mobilisation and relief operation at a trying situation such as this need precise planning and perfect coordination,” Bedi said.
He conceded that there might have been deficiencies in execution. “Nothing can be perfect. But we have done our job effectively, overcoming heavy odds. All debris has been cleared in two days. Around 47,000 people have been given employment under the MGNREGA scheme in the affected districts to sustain their livelihoods.
About 10,000 workers from other parts of the State have been moved to affected pockets to carry out relief and restoration work. The basic needs of the affected are being taken care of,” he said.
COMMents
COMMents
SHARE