What does Mumbai’s experience of the downpour of 2005 tell us about what might, or might not, happen if a major storm hits the city? The ev...
What does Mumbai’s experience of the downpour of 2005 tell us about what might, or might not, happen if a major storm hits the city? The events will, of course, unfold very differently: to start with, a cyclone will arrive not with a few hours’ notice, as was the case with the deluges, but after a warning period of several days. Storms are now so closely tracked, from the time they form onwards, that there is usually an interval of a few days when emergency measures can be put in place.
Of these emergency measures, probably the most effective is evacuation. In historically cyclone-prone areas, like eastern India and Bangladesh, systems have been set up to move millions of people away from the coast when a major storm approaches; these measures have dramatically reduced casualties in recent years. But the increase in cyclonic activity in the Arabian Sea is so recent that there has yet been no need for large-scale evacuations on the subcontinent’s west coast.
Whether such evacuations could be organised at all is an open question. Mumbai has been lucky not to have been hit by a major storm in more than a century; perhaps for that reason the possibility appears...
