How prepared are trains, metros for quakes

NEW DELHI, JANUARY 27: You are travelling on a train with the occasional swaying and swinging of the coaches. Suddenly, the intensity incr...

NEW DELHI, JANUARY 27: You are travelling on a train with the occasional swaying and swinging of the coaches. Suddenly, the intensity increases and you discover it’s an earthquake. How does one cope with such events when one is travelling? Is there a contigency plan at all?

“No. we don’t have any specific plan for earthquakes. But we do have a contigency plan in case of such events,”says a senior Railway officials. In case of an earthquake, according to the official, the driver is instructed to immediately stop the train. The driver and his assistants are supposed to move 280 metres on either side of the tracks and place warning detonators to avoid collision by an approaching train. In case of train they are ignited to immediately halt.

Once the earthquake has subsided, the driver could proceed at very slow speed after insuring that there are no cracks in the tracks. “The idea is to take the tarin to the nearest station so that all the passengers could be safely disembarked,”says the official. But the official conceded that there is no specific earthquake management plan. “Fortuantely, most of the Railway stations are single storeyed so risk of a collapse are far less than a multi storeyed ones,”says the official. But the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) claims to have taken care of earthquakes.

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“Since Delhi falls in zone IV of the five seismic zone, we have taken proper precautions. We have followed both the international as well as the Indian standard codes,”says a DMRC official. The official says that the tracks in the underground section between Tis Hazari and Central Secretariat would be equipped with a monitoring system. The system would record any seismic movement and would convey it to the Operations Control Centre (OCC) so that operations could be immediately stopped.

The airport officials too talked about the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). In times of calamity such as yesterday’s earthquake at Gujarat, full emergency at the airport is declared with special control rooms being set up. All the vital points inlcuding the runway are checked to see if there are cracks or any other damage to it. “We did it as soon as we felt the tremors in Delhi yesterday. Our engineers did not find any damage after they carried out the inspections,”says Roshan Lal, director of the Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA).

If there are damages in the airport and landidn poses a problem, Lal says, flights are diverted to safer airports. Asked if the IGIA has any specific earthquake plan, Lal says: “We have several contigency plans to meet any kind of emergency.”

* Airports Authority of India (AAI) would give special preference to relief flights in case they land in Delhi.
* Railways have announced special trains including goods train to Gujarat.

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