Editorial: Disaster Preparedness

Disaster preparedness should nuance the mood next week as Sikkim marks the first anniversary of the 18 September Earthquake which pulled a wicked surprise on the State. The surprise came in the realisation that Sikkim harboured tectonic potential to push a 6.8 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 troublespots, at faultlines many hundred kilometres away from Sikkim. 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 the Sikkim’s distance from the expected ground zeros would dissipate some of the fury and dissipate the impact. This attitude was admittedly wrong because no one can prevent an earthquake, but everyone can and should work towards mitigating it. And now, even that excuse 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’. As the amplified fury of end-monsoon showers are bringing home, it’s not just about earthquakes, but a host of challenges like landslides, cloudbursts, GLOFs etc and if the winter runs dry, there will be forest fires and man-animal conflicts as well. Natural disasters do not play in isolation and when these incidents seek disaster proportions, they work in combinations. As Sikkim marks the first 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 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 practises with scientific verification and planning. Let’s see what Sikkim drafts for itself.