India participates in major Indian Ocean wide tsunami mock drill

New Delhi, September 4: As India grooves and drools under heavy rainfall and cyclonic condition, India along with 23 nations would be participating in a major Indian ocean-wide tsunami mock drill on September 4 and 5. This mock drill will involve evacuation of thousands of people from coastal areas in over half a dozen states.

The exercise known as IOWave18 is being organized by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO, which coordinated the setting up of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System (IOTWMS) in the aftermath of December 2004 tsunami.

The Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre (ITEWC), based out of the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), Hyderabad, is an autonomous institution under the Union Ministry of Earth Sciences.

The state-of-the-art warning center, operational since October 2007, has all necessary computational and communication infrastructure for the reception of real-time data from the seismic and sea-level network, tsunami modeling, as well as generation and dissemination of tsunami bulletins for the entire Indian Ocean.

Besides testing the SOPs and communication links at all level of the warning chain, a primary objective of the IOWave18 exercise is to enhance tsunami preparedness at the community level.

The purpose of the exercise is to increase tsunami preparedness, evaluate response capabilities in each state and to improve capabilities in each state and improve coordination throughout the region. The exercise would involve the evacuation of more than 1, 25,000 people from the coastal communities of Odisha, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Gujarat, and Goa.