Hyderabad: The Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre (ITEWC) of Hyderabad-based Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) on Tuesday took part in ‘IOWave20’, the Indian Ocean-wide mock tsunami drill.
The INCOIS participated in the Tsunami exercise, both in its capacity as a National Tsunami Warning Centre (NTWC) for India as well as a Tsunami Service Provider (TSP) for the entire Indian Ocean region. During the exercise, ITEWC generated and issued four tsunami bulletins to both its national and regional contacts through GTS, email, fax, SMS as well as website.
The purpose of such exercise is to evaluate the ability of warning centre and national/state/local disaster offices to respond to a tsunami. The drills not only emphasize the testing of communications from warning centre to its stakeholders but also provide an opportunity for testing national/state/local chains of command and decision-making, including the alerting and evacuation of people from selected coastal communities, INCOIS said. Due to Covid-19 pandemic, the exercise was limited to test communication channels instead of full-scale exercise which involves public evacuation.
