Shrieks of ‘bachao bachao' , fire engine bells and police sirens fill the atmosphere. The venue is Delhi's Vyapar Bhavan in ITO, where the government is carrying out a mock drill for disaster preparedness.
Police vans, followed by ambulances trundled in and officials jumped out of the vans to rush into the building. A group of Civil Defense personnel, dressed in lime yellow jackets rushed hither and thither. A group stretched out a large sheet under a first floor window of the building and urged the men perched on the window to jump. The men were visibly scared but after a little hesitation, jumped right into the sheet safely. The situation being enacted was a possible scenario in the case of a real earthquake taking place.
A huge crowd that spontaneously gathered to watch the proceedings was quickly cordoned off with yellow tapes by the police and security. Vehicles could neither enter nor leave the building complex during the duration of the drill.
Fire men were seen carrying supposedly injured persons on their backs, pushing them into ambulances and leaving. Men lay on stretchers with dead written in capital letters on sheets of paper on their chest. There were enough blood and injury marks, plasters and limping persons to recreate a disaster situation. The camera and press persons hovering and jostling for the ‘perfect take' made the mock drill complete.
To check the preparedness of the local authorities and citizenry in the event of an earthquake of high intensity 7.2 on the Richter scale rocking the Capital, a mock drill was conducted by the National Disaster Management Authority and Delhi Disaster Management Authority on Wednesday.
Delhi lies in Seismic Zone IV, a ‘high risk zone' for earthquakes and is proximate to the Delhi-Moradabad fault line. Though it does not fall within the ‘very high damage risk zone' for earthquakes, which includes Kashmir, Punjab, western and central Himalayas, North-East region and Rann of Kutch, Delhi being the national Capital, is especially vulnerable to the impact of natural disasters.
More than 50 per cent of Delhi's population of 14 million lives in highly congested and precarious housing structures that could be seriously affected in a disaster of considerable magnitude, according to the office of the Divisional Commissioner.
Around 500,000 detectable earthquakes occur each year and around 100,000 of these can be felt. Minor earthquakes occur recurrently across the world in US, Japan, New Zealand, Indonesia, Chile, Peru, Pakistan, Iran, Greece and Italy. With rapid urbanisation in areas of high seismic risk, some seismologists warn that a single quake may claim the lives of up to 3 million people. The Pacific Ring of Fire, a 40,000 km long horse-shoe shaped zone is especially vulnerable to earthquakes with close to 80 per cent of the world's earthquakes occurring here. Quakes mostly occur along plate boundaries, such as along the Himalayas.
Many countries conduct frequent mock drills to test the preparedness of people in dealing with disasters. India too, has woken up to the same and is trying to involve the local populace in various preparatory activities.
