It was a dark day in June. The skies had opened up, the downpour was relentless. In flood-prone Sion, with water levels in the neighbourhood climbing by the minute, Ravi Jain dialled the disaster control helpline 1916. To his surprise and relief, civic staff landed up within minutes. They opened manholes to inspect if plastic or other material was blocking the flow. In half an hour, the water in the area began to recede—it was a wooden plank that had stemmed the flow.
For the BMC’s 24x7
Disaster Management Cell (DMC), trouble-shooting in the
monsoon is part of a protocol that stretches round the year, 24x7. The cell receives up to 1,000 phone calls on a typical day, but numbers swell to 3,000 when Mumbai goes under in heavy rain.
Situations vary from stuff as serious as a blaze which broke out in Lower Parel's
Kamala Mills area last year claiming 14 lives to deploying resources for nabbing a simian which may have gate-crashed a housing society. Man and machinery is mobilized depending on gravity and immediacy, and they are prepared for over 100 different scenarios, says
Mahesh Narvekar, chief officer,
BMC Disaster Management Unit. Narvekar has the disconcerting habit of calling the helpline to check if his team is following the protocol. “There is a fear among the staff that the boss may call anytime which keeps them on alert," he says.
Located on the second floor of the civic headquarters at Fort, the control room boasts of 30 hunting lines, a video wall, 50 hotlines to ward offices, police stations, hospitals, and TV screens tuned to news channels. The resources are GIS mapped. A trained staff of 50 fields distress calls over three shifts. It’s come a long way since the operation began in 1999 with all of two phone lines and a wireless. Back then, it operated from a space in the basement, originally used to store old files. Manpower comprised untrained security staff.
The July 2005 deluge changed everything. Rashmi Lokande, the cell’s deputy chief and one of the old-timers, recalls, "Communication lines went down and mobilising resources turned out to be a huge challenge. Back then it was just a few higher-rung officers who had mobile handsets, talking to local staff was not easy." To make it worse, large parts of the city were without power, further strapping the administration’s response. "There were rumours of a tsunami which triggered a stampede in the Nehru Nagar slum at Juhu, killing 18 people. There was no public address system and therefore a message that it was a rumour could not be communicated to the public,” said Narvekar.
Today, the disaster cell has a tie-up with all mobile operators to push public safety alerts. They also have a tie-up with channel operators to broadcast important messages. This monsoon, the cell waded into social media, especially Twitter, to beam out updates on high tide timings, weather forecasts, road closures.
On days of heavy downpour, municipal commissioner Ajoy Mehta, who is seen frequenting the DMC, tracks the city’s movement through 44 screens mounted on a video wall in the control room. The feed comes from around 5,000 cameras across Mumbai. The cameras can be zoomed, panned and tilted to maximise visibility. Mehta often shoots instructions from the control post to staff across the city to speed up action against water logging.
The starting point is usually a call from a citizen. Narvekar says his staff are trained to calm them down long enough to convey the details needed to activate a response. "You know, calls received here are different from a pizza delivery shop or an airline helpline,” he says. “Most callers sound distressed.” Offering an introduction to them often does the trick.
The next step involves mobilising police, fire brigade or other agencies, depending to the need of the hour. And the response time to mobilise external agencies such as the NDRF is down to 30 minutes as opposed to the 2-3 hours it would take earlier. “How quickly one can mobilize the right kind of resources plays a crucial role in tackling a disaster,” says Narvekar.
Finally, as if to underline the stress levels at work, he says, “This is a challenging job, my staff sit with headphones on all through their eight-hour shift. And for that we have a safety officer who is on duty to check in case anyone gets fatigued.”
