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Sunday, 15 April 2012

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Problematic situations to be rectified:

Evacuation plan 98 percent successful


The Disaster Management Ministry is now focusing attention to rectify certain problematic situations that arose on Wednesday following the tsunami alert and the evacuation plan which was 98 percent successful, Disaster Management Minister Mahinda Amaraweera told the Sunday Observer.

“It is fortunate that the country was not affected by a tsunami, but the tsunami warning system and evacuation plans were 98 percent operational on that day and we could have definitely averted any possible loss of human lives”.

“If we had the same system in 2004 we could have saved at least 40,000 lives which were claimed by the tsunami waves”, Minister Amaraweera said.

The Minister said the community based organisations and volunteers who had been trained on evacuation of people did their job properly and the warning systems also functioned well.

He said that he had called for a report as he had received information that some tsunami towers had not functioned properly. “I have called for a report in this regard,” he said.

“Moreover, we are also focusing attention on heavy traffic congestion in urban areas after the tsunami warning was issued as it was a major problem in the evacuation plan”.

“We are trying to train youth from the respective areas to handle vehicular traffic during a tsunami warning, the Minister said.

Disaster Management Centre, Director U. W. L. Chandradasa said that some tsunami towers failed to issue tsunami warnings since the Eastern, Southern and Western coasts had been identified as a tsunami threat.

“All warning systems functioned well to help evacuate people from the coastal belt.

However, people became panicky and this affected the evacuation plan.

It is natural for people to get panicky as they still remember the 2004 tsunami but we have to manage, the situation”, Chandradasa said.

He said another problem was the jamming of the communication system as the tsunami warning messages were not sent to the people properly.

 

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