I hope you all would have had a fantastic Christmas. It was interesting to see that many of you had actually gone to the Church yesterday despite being devout Hindus. The greatness of a religion is its tolerance and acceptance of all religions as equal and its capacity to learn good things from other religions. I am in Newport on Tay, Scotland, UK, currently and everyone here knows about Diwali just as we do about Christmas and Good Friday. The majority should respect the views of the minorities though their own views could be diagrammatically opposite. Christmas inevitably brings back memories of December 25, 2004. I was posted as the Chairman, Tuticorin Port Trust, Tamilnadu. My wife and I left for Madurai that day at 6 am to receive our son and daughter in law who were reaching Madurai from the USA. As I was expecting them to carry heavy baggage we had taken two cars. About half an after we left Tuticorin, I received a call from the Port that there was a strange phenomenon of the sea level rising and falling abruptly and that a ship discharging coal had broken its moorings. I advised the Harbour Master that all ships should be taken out of the harbour and anchored in the anchorage. There is a dictum that in case of any natural calamity the ships were safer in the open sea rather than in the harbour and after more than 32 months as the Port Chairman I was well aware of that. I told my wife that I had to return to Tuticorin immediately and advised her to take a car with her to the airport and rushed back to the Port. On the way, I advised the Traffic Manager to evacuate the Port, which at any point of time has at least two to three thousand workers, except for the employees of the Marine Department who were needed to escort the ships back to the anchorage. When I reached the Port, I found that the water level was rising by about a metre and falling sharply after some time and this was happening periodically. I did not know what was happening yet I knew that it was an unusual happening. I went straight to the Marine Department inside the harbour and found that the mooring staff were reluctant to work as they were concerned about their own safety. I assured them I would be inside the Port till all the ships were shifted to the anchorage and got on to a mooring boat to lead them back to work. The funniest thing is that I do not know swimming till today though I had ventured far into the sea in different kinds of crafts and did white water rafting too from Rishikesh to Hardwar in 1997. I could see that the mooring staff were ashamed of their earlier reluctance to work and they assured me that when the Chairman was willing to face the situation with them they were ready to die for him. I went to the Shipping Control Room and found the Harbour Master coordinating the movement of ships outside the harbour. I asked him what was happening and he replied that it was a Tsunami. I asked him for the details but all he could tell me was that it was the phenomenon of harbour waves. He could not explain anything further but assured me that in another hour the movement of all the ships- totally 13 in number- to the anchorage would be competed. In a neighbouring Port, the ships collided with each other inside the Port and suffered damage beside spilling valuable cargo including containers into the harbour basin. I had advised the Traffic Manager, even while I was on my way to the Port, that the Contingency Plan of setting up a Control Room about a km from the sea should be followed and that the sea level should be monitored every half an hour and plotted in a graph. The employees of the IMD were not willing to perform this job and a Port Employee came forward to do it in a primitive manner. On my way to the Control Room I found that the Fishemen’s hamlet on the beach had been completely flooded and destroyed and ordered that they should be accommodated in the Port School till the District Authorities took over the relief works. The Port Officers Association was requested to provide catering and clothes to them. We all contributed money to sustain the arrangements for the next four days. The Port Employees residing in the Port were offered accommodation in the Port Community Hall though many of them were not willing to move from their houses/apartments. Sea water had intruded into the drainage channels and there was danger of flooding of the Port Township. Sea water had entered the ground floor of the Port Office located on the seashore and several computers were damaged along with the furniture. Several hundreds of people from the Port Township and Tuticorin City had gathered near the seashore to see the strange phenomenon of the sea waves coming far into the shore and then retracting almost a km into the sea with the rocky sea bed visible for the first and last time. By then I knew that the retracting waves could carry everything back into the sea with them and ordered the CISF to barricade the area with ropes and also to lathicharge on the crowd to disperse them for their own safety. Now reports were trickling in that a massive tsunami had hit the Indian Coast and that several thousands had lost their lives from Kanyakumari to Chennai. The District Authorities had no clue about what was the situation in the District. I was in constant touch with the Colombo Port Authority to know about damage to their facilities and the changing sea levels. The waves take about two hours to travel from Colombo to Tuticorin and we would have ample time to take action if the water level went up abruptly in Colombo. The area between Point Calimere and Tuticorin has the natural protection of the Sri Lankan land mass and I was fairly confident that there would be no massive damage to our facilities. Yet, we had to keep up the vigil and the Control room functioned for three days. I stayed in the Port for all the three days going to the Chairman’s Bungalow only for a bath every day, with food being sent to the Control Room. The marine staff and skeletal staff of the Traffic Department stayed in the Port for three days putting themselves at risk and their food requirements were taken care of by the Port. All in all, it was great team effort. My wife was calling me frequently from Madurai and I advise her to return to Tuticorin with my son’s and daughter’s families which had reached Madurai during the day. Though the bungalow itself was hardly 100 metres from the waterfront I had estimated that there was virtually no danger of water reaching the bungalow. When people were fleeing Tuticorin my family was returning to it which attracted considerable media attention. The normal port operations resumed on 27th December. In the afternoon of 25th, we came to know that 100s of children and others playing on the Marina Beach in Chennai were sucked into the sea and the entire stretch of Tamilnadu Coast from Chennai to Point Calimere was badly affected and thousands lost their lives in Chennai, Cuddalore, Nagapattinum and Velankanni off Nagapattinum. Gulf of Mannar and The Palk Bay sustained minor damage only because of the protection offered by Sri Lanka. Kanyakumari was badly affected and strangely, Quilon faced damage and loss of lives by a phenomenon of Quarter Wave Resonance with resonance happening between the incoming waves from the east and receding waves from the west. After the Port operations recommenced it was time to take stock of the damage to Port properties which was not very significant. It took a while for the Dustrct Adminstration to take over the responsibility of providing relief and rehabilitation to the fishermen of the Port hamlet and the Port school could reopen only after they were shifted. Each family was provided utensils, stove, some provisions and clothes by the Port employees. They also arranged to collect three truckloads of similar kits for the villages affected by the tsunami and I arranged port trucks to transport the kits with a few port employees to Nagapattinum. The Port donated a large sum to the PM’s Relief Fund too. A few days later there was another tsunami alert and by then everyone, including me, knew about tsunami and the havoc it could wreck. This time evacuation of the Port took only half an hour and the Port administrative staff were the last to leave. I saw the women employees crying and scared and even my presence with them failed to mollify them. They had no other alternative but to wait for Port buses to return and I kept them engaged with small talk till then. My entire family was in Tuticorin and even a few top officials of the district had deserted their posts and run away. A top police officer had the distinction of being among the first in the City to leave! I stood firm that we should stay back in Tuticorin and kept in touch with the Colombo Port. A man with scientific temper does not unnecessarily panic and deduces logically whether there is any real danger or not. When the tsunami caused by the earthquake could not cause any damage to the Port it was hardly likely that a tsunami caused by the after tremors would cause any. My son, a University Teacher and Researcher and my daughter, a Doctor, understood and comforted my wife who was somewhat unhappy at my decision not to let them leave Tuticorin. A natural disaster cannot be prevented but can be anticipated and preventive action taken to evacuate so that lives and properties are protected. The Tsunami of 2004 highlighted our unpreparedness to face a disaster of that nature and magnitude. Government of India has now put in place an early Tsunami warning system in the Bay of Bengal at considerable cost. It also highlighted the need for a Disaster Management Plan and a laid down protocol to be followed in the event of disasters. We had one in Tuticrin Port and that served us well then and also later. Leadership is not only about getting work done by your subordinates but is all about carrying them with you when it matters the most.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 14:43:41 +0000