How does a district prepare for a mock drill? Some pointers from Dehradun

An exercise has been scheduled in the Uttarakhand capital around 4 pm on Wednesday. Though the hill state has witnessed several mock drills in the past due to the increased probability of natural disasters, this drive to test its civil preparedness is the first to be held in decades.

The staging area will be Police Lines, and the mock drill will be divided into two parts: the first will be communicating the precautions before the incident, and the second will focus on rescue, relief, and rehabilitation.

Speaking to reporters after a coordination meeting, Dehradun District Magistrate Savin Bansal said, “We had a coordination meeting with all stakeholders. Decisions have been taken on responses, staging areas, incident command posts, potential attack areas, and potential victims. One will be at a vital installation, and the second will be a densely populated area. The staging area will be Police Lines, and the resources will be dispatched to the potential attack areas. Apart from communication techniques like SMS and broadcasting channels, we will have civil defence volunteers who will inform and sensitise people in areas allotted to them to help people move from the outside by switching off lights. Immediate electricity shutdown will be activated tomorrow as part of the drill. Traffic police will take care of vehicles and passersby to relocate to houses and shops in the vicinity when the drill takes place,” Bansal said.

According to officers, Dehradun was chosen as one of the districts due to the existence of several institutions, including the Indian Military Academy and DRDO. The DRDO’s Instruments Research and Development Establishment (IRDE), which is devoted to research, design, development, and technology transfer in optical and electro-optical instrumentation, primarily for the Defence services, is in Dehradun.

Dehradun currently has 150 volunteers of the Civil Defence, of whom around 50 are active. Bansal said they will rely on the Incident Response System (IRS) wings for the mock drill because the civil defence volunteer system has become weak.

“There are three wings of the IRS, consisting of over nine departments of officials and personnel. During the mock drill, when a stimulation is raised, our bulk SMS system, sirens, and broadcast system activate. There is a procedure laid down to be followed, that is, situation planning, message transmission, and reactive steps to be taken when the stimulation is activated,” he said.

Dehradun’s mock drill will be conducted in the town, activating its five speakers, which would blare sirens and be used for message transmission. According to the district administration, though there are nine siren systems, five will be used for the mock drill in Dhara Chauki, Blind School Rajpur Road, Lakhibagh police station, DM Collectorate, and Araghar police station. “The coverage of each speaker is limited to 3 km from the source,” Bansal said.

Another officer, who was present at the meeting with the MHA on Tuesday morning, said that the civil defence volunteer system has become redundant. “The meeting was on how we can reactivate this system and to sensitise the general public to create an approach where they are alert in a war-like situation,” she said. Explaining why the response system is in a lull, she said that over the last few decades, though skirmishes and tensions have risen, they were largely confined to a particular area.

According to international humanitarian laws, civil defence organisations and volunteers must not be the target of attacks or reprisals, and their material must be identified by a distinctive sign: a blue triangle on an orange background.