By IANS
Puducherry : India’s first indigenous oceanometric alert-board became operational Friday on the coast of this former French colony, a popular holiday resort. But the system is still in the testing stage.
Scores of curious fishermen gathered at a beach in Puducherry’s coast Friday to see how an integrated information system works, even as an earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale jolted Indonesia’s Bengkulu province early morning, prompting authorities all along the Bay of Bengal coast to remain alert to any changes in the sea.
This is the first digital display board from the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) on the east coast that records turbulence in the sea, wave height and strength, wind speed and direction, and also the location of shoals of fishes etc.
“I hope every hamlet on the coast gets it,” said Chinnasubrayan, a fisherman from Pillaichavadikuppam, whose father died in the Dec 2004 tsunami that killed more than 11,000 people on this coast and rendered nearly 200,000 people homeless.
Mobile phone alert services, police and television news channels also told people on the east coast beaches this morning that another earthquake had hit far off Sumatra and that fishermen should remain away from the shore, demonstrating how technology could make the crucial difference between life and disaster.
It is for the first time that the union government is bringing together several sea measurement reading systems to generate disaster alert on a common platform of the INCOIS.
The INCOIS system was explained to thousands of fishermen on the Puducherry coast Friday by INCOIS ocean science department head and chief scientist T.M. Balakrishnan Nair, with cooperation from local NGOs.
“The board displays the condition in the sea, for the next three days and provides forecasts also,” Nair told the media here.
“Data gathered from buoys out in the sea will be instantly displayed on the digital board on the shore”, he added.
The system is being explained to local authorities, village vigilante groups, coast guard, coastal police and telecom authorities like the BSNL.
INCOIS director Shailesh Naik told IANS in Bangalore that the system on trial had generated a “red” alert Wednesday after the Sumatra quake which promoted the union government to issue alerts along the east coast and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The next day, the system generated an “orange” alert.
Such digital data boards will be in place all along Tamil Nadu and Pudicherry’s 1,100-odd km coast soon, Naik said.
India’s Department of Ocean Development was created in 1981. Since then, especially during the ninth plan period, a number of ocean study systems have been in place in the east coast, under several different ocean information and observation programmes.
The National Data Buoy Programme is being implemented by the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), Chennai. It assembles, deploys and looks after data buoys along the Tamil Nadu-Pondicherry coast.
The buoys are equipped with state-of-the-art sensors for accurate measurement of winds, waves, currents, atmospheric pressure, atmospheric temperature, sea surface temperature, dissolved oxygen, radioactivity etc, and for upper ocean parameters and surface metrological data and are already reading the necessary data for tsunami alerts.
NIOT has a shore station for retrieval, processing, analysis and storage of the data from the buoys and this also goes out to the Met department and the Coast Guard at 03.00 GMT every day.
Communication demonstration stations are already in place at Periya Veereampattinam in Puducherry, Shankarpur and Frassergunj in West Bengal, Paradeep and Chandipur in Orissa and Salegeo in North Goa.
Installed with the help of the Russian Academy of Sciences, unmanned submersibles with sensors are also in place.
Several research vessels help in regular Coastal Ocean Monitoring and Prediction System monitoring by the Central Electro-Chemicals Research Institute in Karaikudi and the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) in Visakhapatnam.
Ocean observations are also done by the Institutes of Ocean Management in Anna University and the University of Madras.