Shillong, Mar 20: East Khasi Hills district administration has urged the local traditional bodies to have their own disaster management plans and ensure that building byelaws are not violated in their respective localities.
“We need to identify a place for relief camp – this every locality should have. They should have a disaster management plan in place,” said deputy commissioner RM Kurbah during a mock disaster drill for earthquake held in the city on Thursday.
Emphasising disaster management plans even at family level besides community level, the DC said, “A family should be trained to stay safe besides ensuring supply of food, water, medicines and clothes that will last at least 78 hours till the district administration gears up to extend the necessary help.”
The mock drill was conducted to ensure preparedness to face any kind of disaster especially earthquake keeping in mind Meghalaya falling under seismic zone 5, said the DC, who is also chairperson of the district disaster management (DDMA).
The DC while stressing need to create more awareness at village level, offices and schools on how to handle the situation in case of earthquake, also appealed to all dorbar shnongs to also come up with their own disaster management plans.
On haphazard construction of buildings, Kurbah said there is need to sensitize people, who are building new houses to have proper planning and to refrain from violating the building byelaws.
“We are living in a zone 5, which is unsafe to build any building as such. There are building byelaws and people should not violate them and they should get their building plans vetted by an engineer is a specialist of this kind of things,” she said.
“People may think this is intruding their privacy, but you should think you are exposing your family or neighbours should your building collapsed,” she said.
Earlier, the mock drill exercise was conducted in presence of National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) officials.
The situation created was based on an earthquake situation of 8.3 ritcher scale.
Kurbah said the district administration had identified eight sites, including landslides, fire incident in one school, petrol pump and some other incidents at Polo market.
“What we learned today is basically communication how we pass through the information right from the base when things happened up to when information received,” she said.
