When Infrastructure Networks Collapse

(note (05/28): I have revised this post extensively since publishing it first yesterday. For news updates, see Reuters India or PTI.)

I always wonder how critical infrastructure systems can get paralyzed during a catastrophic event. This week, in the case of Mumbai, unprecendented rains caused the city to come to a standstill.

At least 87 people were killed in two days of crippling rains and another 130 were feared buried in landslides, according to authorities and news reports.

Troops were deployed after the sudden rains - measuring up to 94.4 centimeters (37.1 inches) in one day in suburban Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra state - stranded tens of thousands of people.

"Most places in India don't receive this kind of rainfall in a year. This is the highest ever recorded in India's history," R.V. Sharma, director of the meteorological department in Mumbai, told The Associated Press.

I heard some personal stories over the phone. You can read one account from Amit Varma, and another from Sonia Faleiro. In another account, Rashmi Bansal claims that parts of the main city floated, but the suburbs sank because city officials chose to protect ministers and high-profile people living in south Mumbai at the cost of inconveniencing suburban folks. This is a rather unsatisfactory explanation.

The main point is how different infrastructure systems including drainage, power, telephones, transportation collapsed in a short amount of time. This type of a failure goes beyond a simple cascading system failure. Not only did individual systems fail, but failure of one system affected other systems and causing them to fail as well. Due to sudden heavy downpour, the City's drainage system was overwhelmed. According to some reports, the city officials decided to lock the gates of the stormwater drainage system because they feared that sea water during the high tide would enter the city (sorry, link is in Marathi). With water flooding different parts of the city, road and train systems shut down (via Indianwriting). In due course, all transportation means of getting in or out of Bombay were effectively been shut, including the airport. Power supply in suburban Bombay had to be shut down for the fears of short circuiting, although it may have been disrupted due to faults in local interconnections at different places. Much of the cell phone networkes were overwhelmed as a large number of customers tried to place calls, causing an outage.

While the main city was sufferring, Reuters and BBC reported that a fire had broken out on one of the offshore oil platforms of Bombay High. It was not clear initially if the torrential rains played a part in this accident, but Reuters reported that an oil rig collided with the platform, and the weather had everything to do with it. There were about 400 people on the platform, of which 271 have been evacuated 348 have been safely evacuated, but rescue operations were hampered due to rough weather. This accident effectively takes out 80,000-100,000 barrels per day of oil supply out of the markets for months to come.

Think about how a large terrorist operation might be able to cripple a city for days or weeks, and how will you counter that threat. Will that be different from countering dramatic changes in weather or catastrophic climate change? How might you want to modify the current Risk Assessment and Vulnerability Analysis as well as Mumbai Disaster Management Plan to better respond to the situation?

UPDATE (08/31): Over the weekend, several bloggers have come together to put together information about last week's massive rains and the current situation in Bombay. This is one example of how blogs are continuing to contribute towards independent reporting and dissemination of information in real time. You might remember the fantastic job SEA-EAT blog has been doing. In the case of Cloudburst Mumbai, much more real time and first hand information is becoming available.

Comments

[BloGod]

Looks like "Govt-is-dumb-But-I-Am-Smart-KnowItAll" are appearing in full force what with even village idiots running a "blog" now.

Even when your beloved US gets hit with lot of rain or storm it is the same story there. When Florida gets hit every year same story there. Thousands of houses are damaged, roads are submerged, electricity is cut.

But no, we are desis and we need to crib even when highest rain fall of the century hits the city.

[Rashmi Bansal]

The claim re: south Bombay was made by a newspaper - Midday. I did link it but admit I may have been mistaken. It wasn't known to me at the time that the southern part of Bombay recd only abt 75 cms of rain while the suburbs recd several times that! Have amended what I wrote!

Yes, natural disasters happen eveywhere but a lot of the problems on Tue occured because of lack of information. Every year Bombay has a couple of bad raindays and you just think "I'll brave it out" - no one knew it could possibly get life-threatening.

Compared to the monsoon situation the ONGC fire was handled far better. The Chairman and petroleum minister were on TV within 3-4 hours of the incident addressing a press conference. If the same strategy had occured to the CM on Tue around 5 or 6 pm there would have been far fewer stranded commuters.

[Anup]

Yes, natural disasters happen eveywhere but a lot of the problems on Tue occured because of lack of information.

This may well be correct. If you look at Mumbai Disaster Management Plan (Sec. 4.2 Communication and Public Information Systems), there is a wish list of items that the Govt. would like to have to do a better job of information dissemination. I would point out, in the light of multiple systems failures experienced on Tuesday and Wednesday, that such a simple minded approach may fail again. Even after power came back, cable networks in many parts of city were still unoperational. Many people have mentioned that they had to depend on radio to get any information. The current DMP does not mention anything about FM radio stations that turned out to be very helpful in this situation. Again, this was no simple disaster as Bombay got it's July average for rain equivalent in one day!

[Vikgrt]

Once again there is gonna be heavey rains in Mumbai
-vikgrt