Vizag will need to be built from scratch

The question that is agitating the mind of many a Vizagite now: Why us? For long, the citizens of this beautiful city banked on the mountain that resembled a dolphin's nose and hence named as such. This natural structure, they believed, was like a shield for the city and protected it from any cyclone.

But the city with a dolphin's nose surrendered arms on October 12. In a matter of six hours, Cyclone Hudhud crossed India's east coast at Vizag and pummelled it into submission.

A philosophical way of looking at it perhaps is to say this kind of devastation was in the destiny of India's City of Destiny. But was this entirely natural or did man have a hand in it?

Disaster management today has become mainly about minimising loss of life which is a fine thing to do. Obviously you cannot have an Uttarakhand or a supercyclone kind of tragedy in which tens of thousands die. But even though the Andhra Pradesh government does not have too much blood on its hands, the inability to have systems which spring back to life put a huge question mark on the state's biggest city, Vizag.

Vizag today is a communication disaster, a city in a state of ruin. NDRF officials predict that the city which has lost 80 per cent of its green cover and 70 per cent areas do not have power, will have to be built from scratch. That is going to be a huge challenge and a double whammy for Andhra Pradesh which first lost Hyderabad to Telangana in the bifurcation process and now its biggest city has been reduced to a heap of rubble. If a massive afforestation drive is not undertaken almost immediately, Vizag will turn into a furnace, with long-term disastrous consequences.

The Vizag airport has become the face of this devastation. If you recall, the old Vizag airport terminal used to resemble like a pond during the monsoon, with luggage trolleys floating around like boats. Which is why this new terminal was built in February 2009 but little did Vizag know that it came with an expiry date of October 2014.

Now it is elementary that when you construct an airport in a coastal city like Visakhapatnam, its aerodynamic design has to be different, in fact very different from that of say, a landlocked city like Delhi or Hyderabad. Here prima facie, the wind load was not factored, which to my mind seems like a case of criminal negligence. How could those who designed and constructed this airport not take into consideration that Vizag airport is on a coast prone to cyclones. How could it ignore that a few hundred km away, the supercyclone of 1999 battered Odisha, with wind speeds in the range of 200 kmph and more.

Those in the know of how this work say the problem perhaps lies in that familiar villain in the construction business: tender. Because for every extra little nut and bolt that you need to put in to make a structure more safe, the cost goes up. From available evidence, there seems to have been some compromise here. What else can explain a five year old airport reduced to rubble. Competence of those built it has to be questioned because clearly the built form was not aerodynamically viable.

The building or rather, what is left of it, is a indication that Vizag is not yet ready to take off.