Magazine : 
Indian Ocean Tsunami Anniversary: 'Tsunami Taught Administrative As Well As Lessons For Life'
CHENNAI: The 2004 tsunami that left over 8,000 people dead and lives of several lakhs upside down as it carved a trail of destruction and despair in Tamil Nadu also taught the administration several valuable lessons in disaster management and relief, said a senior official who was then heading a district which faced the brunt.
“It was a very costly lesson in disaster rehabilitation, though we still wish the lesson could have been learnt in a text-book than being on the field post a major disaster,” state Health Secretary J.Radhakrishnan, then collector of Nagapattinam that was worst-affected among the state’s 13 coastal districts with 6,100 deaths, told IANS.
“The 2004 tsunami taught the government and officials several lessons on being prepared to meet the known and unknown hazards; involvement of community in reconstruction and rehabilitation; the essence of speed in decision-making; the administrative model to meet the immediate needs of the affected and others,” he said.
According to Radhakrishnan, whose grit and determination on the post-tsunami period is still recalled gratefully by villagers of Akkaraipettai in Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu’s experience in rehabilitation and reconstruction activities is now taught to Indian Administrative Service officials. Radhakrishnan said the first lesson learnt is to be prepared for not only known hazards but also unknown ones. He said Nagapattinam is a cyclone-prone area but what was not known till 2004 was about a tsunami’s effect. “Even a country like Japan had to face a cascading effect of the earthquake in 2011. First there was an earthquake that triggered a tsunami. When the giant waves hit the land, nuclear power plants were severely affected,” he said.
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