Several families in Idukki district, where the contentious Mullaiperiyar dam is situated, have stopped their children from school for fear of drowning if the 116-year-old dam breaches, according to chief minister Oommen Chandy.
The public panic is as palpable as it is pathetic, he told a group of editors flown here from Chennai for “an exchange of thoughts” on the dam, which he regretted had become “a thorny issue” between Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
“There have been some avoidable emotional reactions from some quarters which, if persist, may tamper the age-old relationship between the two states”, the chief minister said.
Refuting the suggestion made by one of the editors at the interface that his government and all the state political leaders had hugely contributed to the Idukki panic, Mr Chandy said, “For the first time in Kerala, 27 tremors were felt in a span of five months. People have felt them (tremors), so those fears are genuine. I got reports that students have stopped attending school.”
In the same breath, the chief minister added that the government had undertaken a public awareness programme in which his disaster management officials were also engaged in “identifying houses and places that could get flooded” if the dam breaks due to an earthquake exceeding six on the Richter scale.
When it was pointed out to him that the dam was not in the seismically moderate zone-three and it was most unlikely that a high-intensity earthquake would hit the dam, he shot back saying natural disasters could not be predicted.
Interestingly, the Chennai editors were supplied with a list of 29 tremors between April 11, 2010 and November 26, 2011. The highest intensity of 3.5 on the Richter scale was felt on April 3, 2011, and most of the other tremors were in the range of 1.0 to 2.0.
Additional chief secretary K. Jayakumar, who assisted the chief minister at the editors’ meet, pointed out that tremors in quick succession on November 17 (2.8 on Richter), November 18 (3.4) and November 26 (3.4) had raised the panic levels further.
“We have been living the last 40 years with the fear that the dam is unsafe. This fear has become worse now”, said the senior bureaucrat, who handles the subjects of interstate waters for his government.