Andhra Pradesh to deploy an online command center for disaster management

Andhra Pradesh, which is vulnerable to cyclones, storm surges, and floods, will soon have a customized, online decision making command centre as part of its disaster management strategies.

Having faced more than 60 cyclones in the last 4 decades, Andhra Pradesh is deploying measures to ensure effective disaster management in the future.

The proposed system is called APCOSMIC (AP Critical Operation, Strategic Management, and Incident Management). Any information related to disasters or incidents like a fire, road accident or flooding will first come to the command centre. From there, it will be conveyed to the concerned department.

It will start functioning from March and will be fully functional in a year, according to Prasanna Kumar Venkatesh, Commissioner of AP State Disaster Management Authority. “A Geo-Spatial lab offering multi-hazard risk assessment models would also be set up,” he said in a workshop on Disaster Management on Monday while addressing the students of Gitam Deemed University in Visakhapatnam.

The system would analyze risks and give models of what would happen in a specific time. It would give an estimate of the areas that a disaster would affect.

Such systems currently operate only in Europe and the USA.

Its requirement in Andhra Pradesh comes to be evident, considering the statistics released by the State Disaster Management Department.

About as much as 44 percent of the state is vulnerable to tropical storms and related disasters. At the same time, vulnerability to storm surges is not uniform along the coast of Andhra. Given the lack of uniformity and the frequency of destructive disasters, the APCOSMIC is something to look forward to.