Wanted: A disaster management POA

“A crisis mother — would you be one?” I was asked this by the class representative of my daughter’s school. A crisis mother is the one who alerts other mothers in her area in times of a, well, crisis. The one who needs to have a presence of mind because little children have to be evacuated in emergencies — fire, rain, floods, and the like.

My first thought — how on earth would I be able to get to school, more than a good hour away from my work place in traffic, should I be called upon to be there? And then, almost immediately it struck me, how trivial, to be hesitating on a confirmation because of traffic, roads, the distance involved, when in reality, the issue at hand was so crucial.

Disasters don’t come with warnings attached, they just come. It is an important, necessary requirement, a crisis list, and I am thankful the school has the presence of mind to have such a provision. Because, as the earthquake, tsunami, explosions, in Japan have shown, one cannot be prepared enough for sudden adversity.

News reports outline how Japan was more prepared than China or Haiti before it to withstand nature’s fury. Being exposed to quakes, it reportedly spends billions a year to ensure its buildings are structurally suited to withstand seismic pressures. Plus enforcing stringent measures, reports say, almost certainly kept the death toll lower than it would otherwise have been. Despite such preparedness, if there was still terrible havoc wrought, imagine the consequences without it.

And closer home? The ’04 tsunami might have hit far enough away from the coast of this city to have spared it, but the floods of July 26, 2005, did not. In fact this very paper was launched in the midst of that crisis. How prepared could we possibly be to withstand nature’s wrath?

Going by that one day itself, clearly, not prepared enough. City moms exchanged anguished stories on how they scrambled to fetch their offspring from schools. A few managed to reach school premises, only to find their babies missing. Later, amidst reports of the loss of lives and tales of heroism came the questions — including finger pointing at the weather bureau’s inadequacies, the city’s antiquated drainage system, and the like.

There are enough records on the drama and surreality of the situation, I’ve related these few incidents here only to highlight a particular point, which is, that in the face of extreme calamity, one may well be caught off guard. But if one can, if only by a little bit of practical foresight, increase the odds of surviving such sudden disasters, why not try?

Each and every disaster doesn’t measure 9 on the Richter scale, but might cut close enough to the bone to cause real damage. The fire at Bombay House, very close indeed to my daughter’s school, was enough to set warning bells ringing. Why can’t the authorities propose stricter guidelines on fire/earthquake safety for buildings? Enforce their implementation? Get a public awareness programme in place to counter panic?

Structural engineers caution against the unsoundness of some of the older buildings in the city and the danger lurking therein. Why not get a mapping done? Or, at the very basic level at least, allow for a system of safeguard and support, as my daughter’s school is doing.

Meanwhile, I told the class rep to absolutely do what she thought best — I would gladly be the crisis mother for my area. Because as every other parent on the planet, should a calamity occur, traffic or no traffic, regardless of time and distance, the one place I would want to be is close to my child.