Nagaland Emergency Preparedness Exercise: Lessons learnt

Our Correspondent
Kohima, August 30 (EMN): The Nagaland Emergency Preparedness Exercise (NEPEx), a mega mock drill simulating an earthquake measuring 8.4 magnitude on the Richter Scale, was carried out across the state on Wednesday. The exercise was conducted to generate awareness among the communities and different agencies on how to establish mechanism for effective response to any disaster, particularly with Nagaland being a state that is vulnerable to different natural calamities including earthquakes as it lies on the Seismic Zone V.
The mock drill began with an emergency siren sounding from the Police Headquarters (PHQ) in the state capital and all the district headquarters simultaneously, and recorded a real time disaster response across the eleven districts. The State Emergency Operation Centre (SEOC) and District Emergency Operation Centres (DEOCs) were activated during the exercise.
Following the two-hour long NEPEx, a debriefing session was held at the SEOC in Kohima, wherein the departmental heads under different sections including Operations, Logistics, Response, Medical, Planning etc. reported the action taken as well as their observations.

Communications, hospitals, response manpower found wanting
Shortfall in communication system was the crux of the issues that the state was identified with during the NEPEx today. Additional chief secretary & finance commissioner, Temjen Toy, in his overview of the exercise pointed out that while the entire exercise went well, there were many areas that needed to be relooked into and these include the communication system; equipping of district hospitals down to PHCs of basic emergency equipments; actual manpower requirement of the State Disaster Response Force (SDRF); concentrate more on schools in such exercises; identifying a permanent and centrally located staging area; need for departments to make an inventory of their respective resources; identification of alternative routes (roads); operations section need to work on standard operating procedure (SOP).
Besides the above, the bureaucrat expressed concern that there is only one functional siren in the state capital in the PHQ and when it sounded this morning, nobody in the Secretariat Complex heard it. He underscored the need to install sirens at strategic locations taking in consideration the mountainous position of the towns. He also stressed on opening of more wireless lines of communication as during a disaster, mobile towers or landlines services could be affected.
Meanwhile, the Food & Civil Supplies department was said to have reported that due to the National Food Security Act, not much elbow-room was there to spare food items. Towards this, Toy asserted that an arrangement for an emergency situation has to be worked out for when such disasters happen such as a proper inventory of food items that they have and food items that it will dispatch, so that accounting can be settled later on.
He also said the Nagaland State Disaster Management Authority (NSDMA) also should do more research on how to convert normal available water into drinking water as the people cannot always be dependent on bottled water, taking into account accessibility.
The official also stressed on the need for more training and sensitization to strengthen Community First Responders as it has been proven that the communities are the first to respond in any situation.
Commissioner & Secretary NSDMA, Khrienuo Metha while emphasizing the need to strengthen the SDRF, pointed out that there are currently 3 districts without the SDRF – Longleng, Kiphire and Peren, as there is no district Home Guards & Civil Defence established in those districts yet.
Towards this, additional chief secretary Toy stated that the SDRF manpower in each of the 8 functional districts only stood at 30 presently. On the NSDMA trained IR company, he said there is the question whether they (the trained police personnel) can be requisitioned in times of real disasters and whether they would have the required equipments in their hands.
National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) commandant AKC Singh who observed the mock exercise as a general observer, stated that there had been some difficulties in transport. He also suggested that vulnerable points of the town must be identified with the help of experts and identify and relocate the main staging area accordingly.
DG Prisons & HG & CD, Rupin Sharma was of the view that the NEPEx was too anticipatory when it came to traffic flow. He felt that in a situation of such disaster as an 8.4m earthquake would affect several roads or parts of roads and people would be in a panic mode, not caring about traffic regulations, thereby barring vehicular flow. Towards this, he vouched for more exercises where simulation of total road blockages could be done and anticipations for a real event could be recorded. The official also remarked that many of the walkie-talkies that were issued were not charged while some were unable to connect because of the terrain.
During the day’s mock drill, volunteers from various institutions and establishments also rendered their services.

History revisited
In 2014, a similar mega mock exercise was carried out in the state as part of the North East multi-state preparedness campaign of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), in replication of a possible Magnitude 8.7 Shillong 1897 earthquake.
The NDMA observers had then pointed out that the few gaps that need to be reviewed by the state were the communications systems, logistics and resource management system, and that the Incident Response System (IRS) needed to be put into more practice and public awareness programmes needed to be strengthened.
With Wednesday’s mock drill results falling on similar lines, the onus is on the state government as to how best it should invest and improve on the lessons learnt from these exercises.