Cyclone? City may have misread Met warnings

The feared cyclonic attack from the sea never came. Mumbai saw rains and gusty winds during the morning hours on Wednesday, but cyclone Phyan — predicted to hit the city around 3pm — thankfully failed to show up.

The ground scenario and hourly advisories from the Met office sent the state government  into overdrive: it asked all educational institutions and offices to shut down for the day by 1pm and 2pm, respectively.

For a city that fears 26/7 (the day of the monsoon deluge in 2005) more than 26/11 (the terror attacks last year), the drill turned out to be a false alarm. The Met department believes the state and civic authorities grossly misinterpreted and overreacted to its advisories.

RV Sharma, deputy director-general of meteorology, regional meteorological centre, said: “We had stated that the tidal waves were expected to rise to 6-9 metres near the eye of the storm located 70 km off the city coast. The warning was issued as a caution for ships and fishermen sailing in deep sea.”

“The estimation of storm surge depends on wind speed, angle of the cyclonic storm and nature of the sea bed,” Sharma said. He claimed that the storm lost intensity once it moved landwards. By the time school kids and the working population returned home, the rains had disappeared.

The communique from the Met cautioned that cyclone Phyan, identified as a category I (least damaging) storm, would lead the ocean water to rise above 2.49-3m from the sea level and induce tidal waves to rise to nearly 9m along and off the Maharashtra and Goa coasts. Soon after the first such communication was issued around noon, the state and civic officials got into a meeting and announced the shut down measures.

The ocean waters did not rise to the projected height. Neither did the tidal waves. Senior civic officials are now suggesting that the magnitude of the storm was miscalculated.

“The Simpson hurricane scale used by the national weather services to categorise cyclones claims that the storm surge (ocean water rise) associated with a category I storm is barely four to five feet,” a civic disaster management official said. IIT professor Kapil Gupta, an advisor to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and the state on flood mitigation and other natural calamities, agreed.

“International classification norms state that the storm surge for such cyclones is four to five feet,” he said. He, however, refused to be drawn into the controversy on whether the Met department had got its predictions incorrect.

Acting municipal commissioner RA Rajeev said the civic body acted on the Met department’s projections and prepared itself for mitigating a disaster.