Wind from the sea is changing, cities need to change

Cities need to be well prepared to face any impending natural disaster as per their risk profile and exposure. The role of urban local bodies in making their services and infrastructure resilient is the need of the hour

When the first warning of cyclone Fani was heard by my friend who lives in Bhubaneswar, for him it was like ‘no worries, that’s another coastal cyclone.’ The smart city dweller, living in a concrete building with secured power supply and water supply, had been tuned to such a sense of secured life that he had forgotten a basic fact: Odisha’s capital city is also a coastal city, just 68 kilometres from Puri where the cyclone had its landfall. Another friend, who was visiting the city at that time on a business trip and was staying in a hotel, had nothing to worry as there was no warning for visitors to vacate hotels unlike those who were staying in Puri. The Odisha government, which has earned praises from world over for its efficient pre-cyclone rescue operations, had asked all visitors to Puri to vacate the city and hotels by the evening of May 2. The extremely severe cyclonic storm was to hit the coasts somewhere near Puri the next day afternoon.
Bhubaneswar had no such warning. The city expected some turbulent wind and rains but no one expected the kind of damage it actually suffered. The cyclone’s trajectory post-landfall was unprecedented and surprised all. Not only it made a landfall before time but also it moved inward with gusting wind speed of about 200 kilometres per hour (kmph) to devastate Bhubaneswar and almost entire coastal Odisha in a way not seen in the past twenty years. Odisha government has pegged the losses at somewhere around `10,000 crore. While the economy of the state has received a huge jolt, the ecology of the capital city and coastal Odisha has gone back by at least three decades if one does the calculation of time the new trees will take to grow.

Odisha’s evacuation record, a global example
The Super Cyclone of 1999, that was instrumental, along with the Gujarat earthquake of 2001, information of a new disaster management regime in the country, caused the death of more than 10,000 people and took the state back by decades with the extent of damages it caused. Lessons from that catastrophic disaster have strengthened Odisha’s preparedness efforts and the human casualty has been reduced to almost zero. Increased efficiency of technology in predicting the cyclones and improved coordination between different authorities within the state government, and also between the State and Centre have all reduced the human casualty drastically. Officially, the human death toll of Fani was 64. Not zero, but comparing that with some of the hurricanes that have hit advanced nations can tell us what a significant effort the Odisha government has put in to reduce death tolls. In Hurricane Katrina, that made landfall in southeast Louisiana and Florida on August 29, 2005, more than 1,800 people died as a result of storm across the Gulf Coast. Some researchers still doubt these figures though and consider the real number of dead persons to be much higher. 12 years after, category 5 storm Maria caused 2,975 deaths.
Predictions about cyclone formations and movements have drastically improved in India. However, the increase in the ocean and land temperature is making them more intense and unpredictable by the day. Met predictions kept changing and Odisha practically got only two days to evacuate people. More than a million people were shifted to cyclone shelters and other places. That’s a commendable job and Odisha earned praises from the UN and many other agencies and governments, rightly so.

Changing climate, unpredictable cyclones
On April 25, 2019 when the India Meteorological Department (IMD) reported about the formation of a well-marked low-pressure area centered over East Equatorial Indian Ocean & adjoining southeast Bay of Bengal, there was no clue of it coming the Odisha way. The IMD had predicted then that this was very likely to move north-westwards along & off east coast of Sri Lanka near north Tamil Nadu coast on April 30. The next day it concentrated into a depression and then moved onto become a deep depression by April 27, turning into a Cyclonic Storm the same day. It was named Fani. The IMD predicted this cyclonic storm would turn into a severe cyclonic storm in the next one day and would very likely move north-westwards off Sri Lanka coast during next three days to reach north Tamil Nadu and south Andhra Pradesh coasts on April 30. It’s only on the April 28, that the IMD predicted likelihood of light to moderate rainfall at a few places over the districts of south coastal and adjoining districts of interior Odisha on May 2. Heavy rainfall was predicted for the same date only for one or two places in the southern districts of Odisha and increased intensity of rainfall on the next day in coastal Odisha.
It’s after that the Odisha government officials analysed forecast of international met agencies along with that of IMD’s. The cyclone’s movement was changing fast and on April 30, it converted from a Severe Cyclonic Storm to Very Severe Cyclonic Storm. Odisha started preparing its actions and by the night of 30th, the IMD had issued predictions that the landfall of the cyclone – that had already converted into an Extremely Severe Cyclonic Storm by then – would be somewhere in Odisha coast on the evening of May 3. The prediction was later preponed to sometime around noon but finally the landfall occurred much earlier than noon time on May 3, near Puri. Government sources reported that Fani made landfall at about 8.30 AM on May 3, between Satapada and Puri as an Extremely Severe Cyclonic Storm. As reported by the IMD, the maximum sustained surface wind speed of 170-180 kmph gusting to 205 kmph was observed during landfall. This continued for six hours after the landfall and decreased thereafter. The Doppler radar image at Paradeep shows that the cyclone completely made landfall at 9.42 AM on May 3, 2019.

Building climate-smart cities
Technology to predict cyclones is improving drastically, but cyclones are getting more unpredictable by the day. The IMD officials, based on their scientific observations, said that Cyclone Fani was the longest-lived cyclone in the Bay of Bengal ever observed. The elongated time period of the storm went on for eleven days in the sea and land put together. What is more rare, Fani is only the second severe cyclone in the last 118 years to form in the Bay of Bengal in the month of April and cross over to the Indian mainland. The earlier one was Nargis that devastated Myanmar in 2008. In between 1891-2017, only 14 severe tropical cyclones were formed in April over the Bay of Bengal and only one storm crossed the Indian mainland.
Cyclones such as Fani are intensifying too fast just before landing and the wind trajectory after landfall too is getting unprecedented. That’s exactly what happened this time and my friend in Bhubaneswar and all others in the city were completely taken by surprise. The smart city went out of power, water, mobile network and internet connectivity as the cyclone hit it with a gusting speed of near about 200 kmph after making landfall at Puri. My friend in the hotel could not move out for days as the roads were all blocked by fallen and uprooted trees. The city was completely devastated and has lost vast chunks of its greenery. Basic amenities took at least 7 days to be restored in some parts, and for others things came back to normalcy in about a month’s time. The poor in the city are still struggling to gather their pieces. Tropical cyclones are going to increase in their intensity due to climate change. Many scientific studies predict that the number of tropical cyclones may decrease if we can limit the global warming to 1.5 Degree C or even 2 Degree C. However, most of them project an increase in intensity of these cyclones. That a 2 Degree C global warming scenario can increase the intensity of such cyclones by 10 per cent is a generally consistent finding in many studies. The IPCC Special Report too warns that the intensity of storms is likely to increase and more of the highest category cyclones will occur. With only 17 per cent of the Indian east coast, Odisha is affected by nearly 35 per cent of all cyclonic and severe cyclonic storms that have crossed the east coast and associated storm surges that have often inundated large tracts of coastal districts. So, the Bhubaneswar city-dwellers can no longer ignore the destruction of coastal green corridors such as the mangrove forests. They can’t either leave all responsibility to the urban local bodies and government. They have to work with the city authorities on a climate-resilient plan and also support the communities – both urban and rural – in the areas adjacent to the coasts in building their resilience. Bhubaneswar needs to understand that a lost mangrove corridor in Puri is an increased risk for the capital city; an addition to coal-fired power plants in the state or anywhere in the world will increase the intensity of cyclones; and, destruction of natural biodiversity-rich forests in distant villages and everywhere will increase their vulnerability to climate change impacts. Cities can’t and must not grow as isolated islands of concrete jungles.