Risk Reduction and Disaster Preparedness

Editorial-
Disaster preparedness will temper the mood across Sikkim on Wednesday as the State marks the second anniversary of the 18 September Earthquake. Preparedness has to be the key word not just for Wednesday, but has to be a constant state of mind not only for individuals residing here, but more importantly for agencies – governmental and NGO – which will have to measure up as first responders whenever the need arrives. And make no mistake, they will be called upon to deliver eventually. A mega earthquake is a certainty in the future, only its timing is not certain. It is important that when the next one arrives, Sikkim is not caught by surprise because there can be no excuse for it not to be better prepared after that 2011 alarm bell.
18 Sept 2011 caught Sikkim by surprise because that evening delivered the realisation that Sikkim had tectonic potential to push a 6.8 richter scale earthquake. Through the recorded history of earthquakes in the region, the big ones of the past century and a half had been earthquakes with their epicentres at established trouble-spots substantially faraway from Sikkim, at faultlines many hundred kilometres away. In some warped sense of misplaced security, this had convinced people at a subconscious level in these parts that the State could do very little to cushion the impact of the next big one and that Sikkim’s distance from the expected ground zeros would dissipate some of the fury and intensity. This attitude was admittedly flawed because no one can prevent an earthquake, but everyone can and should work towards mitigating it. And now, even the excuse of ‘distance’ is no longer available with the tectonic plates holding up Sikkim announcing that even they can pack a mean punch. In effect then, natural disasters are no longer about ‘if’ and ‘when’ and have now become ‘here and now’. And in Sikkim’s case, as every monsoon proves, it’s not just about earthquakes, but also a host of challenges like landslides, cloudbursts, GLOFs etc and if the winter runs dry, there will be forest fires and human-wildlife conflicts as well. Natural disasters do not play in isolation and when these incidents register disaster proportions, they work in combinations. As Sikkim marks the second anniversary, after it has recollected the experience and taken stock of repairs and restoration, it should test the practicability and resoluteness of its proposed responses for future calamities.
Modern lifestyles have a way of blindsiding obvious realities, and if any lesson is to be learnt from the 18 September 2011 horror, it should be in rediscovering the traditional knowledge base. Centuries of living in a particular region grooms people to instinctively respect the brute force of nature and adopt lifestyles which mitigate the impact of the nature of disasters indigenous to a particular region. Sikkim obviously had this, but lost it in the past fifty years or so. These need to be remembered and all disaster preparedness plans should respect the knowhow of resident populations and reinforce traditional practices with scientific verification and planning. Let’s see what Sikkim drafts for itself.