City sits on a powder keg

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If the recommendations of the seminar, Vision 2030 organised by the Greater Cochin Development Authority are realised, the city, which is sitting on a powder keg, will soon have a comprehensive disaster management master plan.

Pointing to the pathetic disaster management system in the city, T. Nanda Kumar (IAS), member of the National Disaster Management Authority, stressed the need to have a detailed list of major hazards in the city, outline their risk assessment and draw up an action plan to address them.

“It’s high time, for instance, to revise the archaic Fire Safety rules. There should be periodic checking of big buildings to ensure the safety aspects as most of the building owners change the structure after getting the occupancy certificate,” he said.

Besides other natural disasters, he said the city was highly vulnerable to chemical outbreaks and industrial accidents. He has presented a paper on ‘Disaster management plan and its significance in the emerging metropolitan city of Kochi’.

Participating in the discussion, experts observed that with the presence of huge oil tanks, underground oil pipelines, an LNG terminal and a shipyard, the city has a high disaster risk factor.

GCDA chairman N Venugopal will write to the government seeking to constitute a permanent advisory panel which will advise the authorities about planning and implementing various projects. The committee will include experts from various sectors, he said.

Meanwhile, emphasising the need to develop small self-contained towns instead of large metropolitan cities, Thomas Isaac, MLA, said funding was never a problem for development projects in the state. Land sca-rcity is the major problem affecting the projects, he said.