Tsunami attack and the importance of preparedness

The recent Tsunami attack in Pondicherry region (South India) resulted in the death of about 300 individuals and property damage running close to a hundred million dollars. The affected coastline was not more than 50 km in length.

Accounts from the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation based in Madras, India(www.mssrf.org), indicated that two rural onshore sites had significantly lower loss of lives. This was due to the stndard practice in those locations where a loud speaker was used in a public information center to make announcements about important events. This had been used since 1999 to make weather-related announcements and was linked to an internet-connected PC. A nummber of individuals were aware of the standard practice.

Thus, when the news of a possible sea rise was received in a village home, this arrangement was used to alert every household and a number of people made it to safe locations in time.

I used to be involved in setting this village project up and I note that the advantage derived was not just from the access to the Internet, but in having a local strategy and standardised practice for popular communication. This is a point that David Dickson, wellknown farm science communicator, also made in a piece on Scidev.net.

I believe this synergy between a top-down approach and a locally-founded and contextually-sensitive communication system lies at the heart of preparedness among the ordinary people. This is probably the best way to help rural families receive science-derived information quickly. Given that South Asia is the most disaster-prone region in the world, there is a need to build generic systems for popular preparedness to cope with a variety of events-floods, cyclones, wild fires, drought etc.

In this blog, I will present you with some ideas and a lot of information on what drought prepraredness.