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Hi,
I read through the contents with great interest. I have faced three occasions of major calamities - one of basement flooding due to heavy cyclonic rain, one of a fire and one of a wall collapse.
We had the utilities including back up gensets in the located in the basement. Within a six hour period, it rained about 21 cms - unheard of in Chennai, India. Water was flooding the basement through the WCs and urinals located below ground level, since the sewage system made of 8 inch pipes were connected erroneously with the storm water drains leading to the rainwater harvesting well. The pipes were too small for the kind of flow and backed up into the rest rooms. Luckily our ERT responses were good and all the portable pumps worked. The utility supply had to be switched off for some time when the water level rose to about 8 inches in the basement, but the gensets took over the supply. The connected critical datacenter continued to function without any interruption throughout the deluge.
The second was a fire in one of the buildings. The fire started from the fan coil unit of one of the spit units and spread to most parts of the small building completely gutting the raised ground floor and parts of the first floor & basement. Luckily this happened late in the night. The skeleton duty staff could not do much with the fire and the local fire brigade did the firefighting. There were consequential damages due to water logging in the basement (water used to douse the fire), smoke entering other areas through ventialation ducts etc. If the problem had occurred in the daytime, probably the fire would have been detected in time and doused by the duty staff.
The third incident mentioned was never expected. One of my premises was adjacent to a place where construction activity was going on. There was a solid, high old wall separating the two plots. Over a weekend,the construction company excavated large volume of wet mud and stored it packed to the wall. The wall got soaked, became soggy and collapsed, bringing down a few fully grown trees. The tree branches penetrated the building at various points including couple of fire proof doors, a few windows and ventillators. This happened at midnight, hence there were no casualities. The security guard who had just taken a round of the place was the ony eyewitness and was in shock, since he had just passed the area a few seconds before. During working time there are cars parked parallel to the building and people come out for fresh air and sit underneath the trees.
I wanted to bring out a few live incidents to bring out the need to be prepared and trained to successfully overcome emergencies.
Many areas of Mumbai, India are prone to flooding to flooding during the monsoon seasons. The Mumbai Civic bodies and the corporates work together these days in forecasting the likely dates of flooding and propare well in advance.
Complacency is one of the biggest threats to emergency response. All the stake holders of any facility need to be educated on the consequences of known disasters and made to take the mock drills seriously.