The Calcutta Municipal Corporation convened meetings with CESC and disaster management agencies throughout Thursday. The approach was different from last year — 36 hours had passed after Amphan when the CMC convened a coordination meeting to restore normality in the city.
Personnel of the National Disaster Response Force will be kept on high alert from May 25, a day before the cyclone is tipped to hit land, officials said.The coastal districts of Gangetic Bengal are set to get rainfall, accompanied by gusts of wind, from May 25 as Cyclone Yaas nears the Bengal coast, the Met office said on Friday. “The system is tipped to intensify into a cyclone by May 24 and reach the Bengal-Odisha coast by the morning of May 26,” said the official.
Uprooted trees had emerged as the biggest hurdle to restoring normal life in the aftermath of Amphan. Engineers of power utilities had said fallen trees had delayed work on repairing or replacing damaged or snapped cables.
“Each of the 16 boroughs will have three emergency response teams. We are also trying to have a group of tree cutters in each of the 144 wards. The number of men deployed will be close to three times more than last year,” said Debasish Kumar, a member of the board of administrators of the CMC.
The stock of saws, ladders, JCB cranes and payloaders — needed to cut trees and remove debris — has also been ramped up significantly, he said, without going into specifics.
The CMC estimated that thousands of electric poles were uprooted across the city during Amphan. Engineers had attributed the high count of electric poles felled to the weight of cables on them, many of them defunct. A trip across the city on Thursday and Friday showed little had changed. From Elgin Road to Ballygunge Circular Road, thick meshes of wires hanging from poles made their way through the canopy of trees — the perfect recipe for a rerun of last year’s disaster.