INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOMATICS AND GEOSCIENCES Volume 2, No 1, 2011

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1 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOMATICS AND GEOSCIENCES Volume 2, No 1, 2011 Copyright 2010 All rights reserved Integrated Publishing services Research article ISSN Use of DesInventar Database for Preparation of Disaster Management Plan for Vellore District, Tamil Nadu State, India Associate Professor Center for Disaster Mitigation and Management, VIT University, Vellore , Tamil Nadu, India. ABSTRACT Natural disasters itself are inevitable and have a drastic effect on our lives and have proven to be detrimental to our economy as well. The risk of human life due to natural disasters can be avoided by looking back into our past. The method of assessing the impact of past occurrences of hazards will provide us with enough information to react effectively and be prepared for all eventualities. The past experience has shown that the occurrence of small and medium scale disasters can be a precursor to big disasters, and the cumulative impact of small and medium disasters may equal or even exceed that of big disasters. The present study based on DesInventar Methodology, which analyse the small and medium level disasters and their impact on human lives and Infrastructures were studied for the duration of 30years from 1976 to 2006 for the Vellore District in the State of Tamil Nadu. The data on past disaster events were collected from authenticated sources through data cards and entered in the DesInventar database for analysis. About 12 major disaster events were considered for the present study, which have high frequency of recurrence in the Vellore District. The output spatial maps clearly indicate the multi disaster affected taluks of Vellore district. These maps will be useful to the stakeholders and Government officials to assess the damage for a forthcoming disaster event and have a clear disaster management plan for the district. Keywords: Hazard, DesInventar, Impact, Eatabase, Vellore 1. Introduction India has always been prone to disasters but of lately, prone would be an understatement. It is India s vulnerability that stands to judge the impact of its hazards. The State of Tamil Nadu was the most affected in terms of human tragedy, property loss in the Indian Ocean Tsunami on 26 th December 2004 (Ganapathy 2008). Also, the state faces severe crisis every year because of seasonal floods. The creation of historic database becomes necessary to know about trends, patterns and seasonality of disasters affecting the state and have a holistic approach towards long term preparedness and mitigation of Disasters. Gathering authentic data about all the major disasters that occurred in a particular area storing them in the database and deriving analysed outputs and having appropriate management plans to handle such tragedies in the future. The present paper focuses on the impact of small and medium level disasters in the Vellore District for the years 1976 to This study is based in the passed work carried out by Ganapathy et.al (2008, 2009 & 2010) Submitted on September 2011 published on November

2 2. Materials and Method 2.1 Socio Economic and Hazard Profile of Vellore District Vellore district has an area of 6077sq.km and is one of the 31 districts in the Tamil Nadu state of India. Vellore City is the headquarters of this district. It lies between to North latitudes and to East longitudes in South Indian State, Tamil Nadu. This district has 8 taluks, 20 Blocks, 14 Municipalities, 753 Panchayat villages, 22 special villages, 883 census villages and 13 census towns. It had a population of 3,477,317 as of Also the Vellore district falls under moderate seismic hazard zone as per the Bureau of Indian Standard code of provision (BIS, 2002) (Figure 1). Figure 1: Location map of Vellore District in the Seismic Hazard Map of India 2.2 Disaster Database Compiling a database of natural disasters that have occurred in this century in Asia will be a valuable asset in the next century. Information becomes useful only when referred to for analysis. Analysis of collected information is beginning to help clarify the specific circumstances and need of various people. Every block has been approached and authentic data was collected. The data cards for 30 years from were collected from various authenticated government agencies and entered in the DesInventar Database. The 12 major 283

3 disaster events were considered for the present study, which have a higher frequency of recurrence in the Vellore District. The methodology includes - data is collected from all the blocks in Vellore in the form of data cards. - the small and medium disasters are segregated. - In most cases, a disaster event is registered as multiple data cards corresponding to the smallest geographical unit in the database. In other words, number of data cards does not necessarily equate to number of disaster events. This has to be taken into account while analyzing the data. - All the disasters are not recorded or written into data cards. Only the ones that cause damage to human lives, property or infrastructure are considered. (DesInventar 2006) This data in the database is analysed and used in case of future reference. There are several qualifications and limitations in the Historical Disaster Information System and the preliminary analysis that have to be taken into consideration. The availability of good records from is considered for the present analysis. 3. Findings 3.1 Frequency of Disasters in Vellore District Figure 2: Major Disaster Events and their order of percentage in Vellore District The Figure 2 depicts the frequently occurring disaster is Fire which results in maximum damage since 50% of the hazards are due to these fires. Floods and rains are 22% and 12% respectively. This is the main reason why crops are damaged and destroyed. Floods drown crops and cause erosion which makes the land unfertile. Only 8% of the disasters that occur are accidents and the remaining 5% are forest fires, epidemic, structure and others. 284

4 3.2 Disaster events for the years All the disasters that occur are recorded in the form of datacards which contain all the information on that particular disaster. There maybe many datacards but all disasters may not have had drastic affect, however every disaster is recorded in every Taluk. The Figure 3 depicts datacards distribution in each Taluk; which in turn tells us the number of disasters that occurred. The vellore block has 628, the maximum number of datacards which clearly shows how prone vellore is to disasters. Arakkonam has 229 datacards, which indicates the higher impact of disasters in the study period.. Arcot has 154, Wallajah 123 and Tiruppattur 63 datacards. Figure 3: Spatial distribution of disaster events in Vellore District 3.3 Deaths caused by All disaster events : The number of lives lost in each block of the Vellore district is presented in the Figure 4. The number of deaths need not be proportional to the number of datacards. A few disasters occur but cause minimal damage or no damage at all. The total deaths of the Vellore Taluk are 80, which again is greater than the other Taluks. In the Vaniambadi taluk 42 lives lost due to these disasters and 30 in Tiruppattur. The lives lost in Katpadi are 13 which is the minimum number and is shown in Figure 4. The total number of death for the all the taluks is 240. Figure 4: Taluk wise deaths caused by all disasters 285

5 3.4 Disaster Impact on Houses : (a) 5 (b) Figure 5: Impact on the houses due to various disasters in Vellore district a) destroyed houses b) damaged houses In the thirty years that data has been recorded, Vellore has the most number of houses destroyed. There were 1316 houses destroyed due to the natural hazards during the years 1976 to 2006 (Figure 5a). A total number of 574 houses were destroyed in Arokkonam and 341 houses in Tiruppattur. The total destroyed houses in the Vellore district is There are 2787 houses damaged in the 30 years that this data was recorded. The maximum damage is mainly attributed to fires, floods and rains which occur more frequently in the Vellore district houses were damaged in Arcot, 1644 in Arakkonamand 1575 in Gudiyattam. The total number of houses destroyed were 8999 which is nearly in ten thousand (Figure 5b). 3.5 Taluk wise summary of events The details of each block in Vellore district, the datacards collected, the deaths, the damage and the overall loss given in Table 1. The total datacards collected are 1357 and the total number of lives lost due to these disasters is 240. Table 1: Summary of disaster events and their impact in Vellore district. 286

6 4. Conclusions The preliminary analysis on historical disaster database for the State of Tamil Nadu was carried out using DesInventar database. Study on occurrences, impact and hazard Specific analysis was carried out for the years from the Indisdata. Totally 30 hazard events have been taken into consideration from the database. Twelve events were selected for the hazard specific analysis based on their occurrence and impact on human lives and damage to property. While Fire, Floods and Rains are occurred most frequently, the event tsunami has claimed the largest number of lives, totalling 240 lives, followed by Flood, Fire, Accident, Rains, and epidemic and lightning. The largest houses destroyed in Vellore Taluk ie 1316 out of 2676 and the largest damaged houses are also in Vellore 2787 out of The taluk Arcot is also close to this number which is The total loss of lives in Vellore District is 240 and the maximum death occurred in Vellore Taluk 80 followed by Vaniambadi which have a total number of 42 deaths. The multi disaster taluks in Vellore district is arranged on basis of impact viz, Vellore, Arakkonam, Vaniambadi followed by other Taluks. 5. Acknowledgements The author acknowledge all facilities provided by Dr.G.Viswanathan, Chancellor, VIT University, Vellore. The Government of Tamil Nadu is gratefully acknowledged for the database. The United Nation Development Programme (UNDP), India is gratefully acknowledged. The constant encouragement given by Prof.S.K. Sekar, Director, Centre for Disaster Mitigation and Management, VIT University, Vellore, India is gratefully acknowledged. 6. References 1. DesInventar (2006), Preliminary Analysis Methodology, DesInventar Server 7, Version 7.0.1, March 2006, pp Ganapathy, G.P.(2008), Analysis of Historical Disaster Database for the State of Tamil Nadu, unpublished report by CDMM, VIT University. 3. G.P.Ganapathy (2010), Historic Disaster Database Creation and Disaster Impact Analysis - A case study Tamil Nadu State, National Institute of Epidemology, 13 th September 2010, Chennai, India. 4. Ganapathy, G.P and D. P.Kothari (2009), Creation and Analysis of Historic Disaster Database for the State of Tamil Nadu, A VIT University, CDMM Initiative, International Conference on "Advances in Mechanical and Building Sciences in the 3'rd Millennium (ICAMB-2009), December 14-16, VIT University, Vellore. 287

7 5. Ganapathy, G.P. and D. P.Kothari (2010), Thirty Years of Disasters and Its Impact in the State of Tamil Nadu A Spatio and Temporal Analyses, International Journal of Earth sciences and Engineering, ISSN , Volume 03, No.04, pp , August 2010 Indexed in Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), Geo Information Service -USA 6. Ganapathy G. P.,Kothari D. P.(2011), "Thirty Years of Natural Disasters and Their Impacts ", LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, ISBN , ISBN , Edition Paperback 04/2011, 280p. 288