The Kerala catastrophe - Could timely action from the govt have saved lives?
Had the gates of the state’s dams been opened earlier, the scale of the disaster would have been smaller.
More than 160 people have died and lakhs left homeless as rain continues to batter Kerala, which is reeling under the worst flood it has witnessed since 1924.
Even as the Armed Forces and the National Disaster Response Force are joined by the local fishermen in rescue and relief operations, the fate of millions hang in the balance — according to reports, 2,23,000 people have been accommodated in 1 ,568 relief camps across the state, road and rail transport are completely suspended in several areas, hospitals battle a lack of liquid oxygen and diesel, and crops and property worth Rs8,000 crore have been damaged.
But rain fury alone is not responsible for the state’s miseries.
For the first time ever, shutters of 35 of Kerala’s 39 dams were opened, within days of each other. At a time when the state was already receiving more rainfall than usual, the excess water from the dams flooded the rivers. The adjoining areas were inundated, houses and roads submerged in water, residents forced to flee.
What is more, according to some locals, proper warnings were not given to them about the sluice gates opening, leaving them with little time to gather their belongings and move to safety.
Why were the dams not opened well in time, before the rains got worse? Why did authorities wait for water levels to reach the danger mark, necessitating the opening of all the dam gates around the same time?
Even as the decision to open the gates was being delayed, why were people in the nearby areas not moved to safety?
These are some of the questions the Pinarayi Vijayan government needs to answer.
An article in Firstpost quotes Murali Thummarukudy, chief of Disaster Risk Reduction in the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), as saying: "Sitting at Geneva, I had on June 14 cautioned that the reservoirs will be filled by July. I had made the prediction based on the experience in Thailand and Pakistan. Unfortunately, our engineers did not foresee this.”
Residents, too, have been quoted as saying that Idamalayar dam in Ernakulam and Banasara Sagar dam in Wayanad were opened without giving them adequate warning, and all the five shutters of the Cheruthoni dam were opened together, instead of opening them phase-wise with simultaneous evacuation of people.
Firstpost has quoted dam safety expert N Sasidharan as saying: “The authorities waited till the water level in the Idamalayar reservoir reached its capacity of 169 feet. If it was opened when the water level reached 165 feet, it would not have necessitated the evacuation of many people in the downstream areas. This is the result of poor planning by the disaster management authority.”
The same complaint has been made about the Idukki dam too, opened for the first time since 1992. Warnings about Idukki were being raised as early as July 31. But that time, state water resources minister Mathew T Thomas had said there was no need for even a trial run of opening the dam’s sluice gates, as the “water level was rising only by 0.02 feet an hour”.
The South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) has cited how the water level in Idukki rose faster because two of its six turbines, that use water for power generation, were non-functional. One of these was shut down on June 26 for annual maintenance. What was the point of shutting down a turbine for maintenance just before the monsoon?
Also, as late as on August 17, Kerala and Tamil Nadu were arguing over the Mullaperiyar Dam, which is managed by Tamil Nadu.
Clearly, as disaster surged close, the state government was caught napping. Contrast this with Odisha in 2013, when, during the Cyclone Phailin, timely warnings and evacuation of people had ensured that the loss of lives was minimised — 38, as compared with the 167 in Kerala already. A report by the United Nations Environment Programme’s Global Environment Alert Service had said about the Odisha government: “Government cooperation, preparedness at the community level, early warning communication and lessons learned from Cyclone 05B [in 1999], contributed to the successful evacuation operation, effective preparation activities and impact mitigation.”
If resource-strapped Odisha could have prepared itself so well for a natural disaster, could not richer, more developed Kerala have done the same?
Even apart from this, there is a lot the Kerala government needs to answer for.
In 2011, the Gadgil Committee made several suggestions to Kerala to conserve the ecologically fragile Western Ghats. The recommendations included restrictions on mining and quarrying, on use of land for non-forest purposes, and on the unabated proliferation of high-rise buildings. The government had rejected the report.
Now, environmentalists are pointing out that widespread and uncontrolled quarrying has led to the mudslides the state is witnessing, which are responsible for the most number of deaths in these floods.
Once the flood and fury recede, there are many lessons the government of Kerala needs to take from this disaster.