BHUBANESWAR: The task was difficult. After the four-phase polls when the entire administration was engaged in election work, reorienting it to tackle one of the severest tropical storms which hit the Odisha coast did not seem to be an easy option when more than one million people were on its line. However, the Odisha Government evacuated a record number of over 11.6 lakh people to safer places within 24 hours and housed them in 6,575 cyclone shelters.
As Fani was heading towards Puri, the work was no doubt daunting. About 25,000 tourists were also safely evacuated from Puri, Ganjam, Cuttack and Balasore districts. Three special trains were run from Puri to Howrah and Shalimar in West Bengal on Thursday to facilitate the evacuation of tourists.
The operation was so massive that the Odisha Government had to deploy hundreds of officials to shift people from vulnerable places to the shelters. This is not the first time that the Government had to evacuate people to safer places before cyclones. It had successfully done this before Phailin and Titli hit the Odisha coast in 2013 and 2018 respectively.
To warn people of what was coming and move them to safer places, the Government deployed over 40,000 volunteers, hundreds of emergency workers and sent 2.6 million text messages. The United Nations and international media have lauded Odisha’s timely efforts and management of cyclone Fani. Mami Mizutori, UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction said India’s zero casualty approach to managing extreme weather events is a major contribution to the implementation of the SendaiFramework and the reduction of loss of life from such events.
Global pat on Govt for evacuation
“I look forward to hearing more about CycloneFani at the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction at Geneva, Switzerland to be held between May 13 and 17,” she said.On Friday, The spokesperson for the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (ODRR) Denis McClean said in a statement, “They seem to have done a very good job in terms of minimising the possibility of loss of life. The almost pinpoint accuracy of the warnings and early warnings from the IMD allow them to conduct a very well targeted evacuation plan which resulted in 1.1 million people moving to about 900 cyclone shelters,” he said.