Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio and others during the inauguration of SEOC in Kohima on March 3. (Morung Photo)
Kohima: Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio today inaugurated the State Emergency Operation Centre (SEOC) here at the office premises of the Nagaland State Disaster Management Authority (NSDMA) under home department. NSDMA is located at Old Secretariat Complex. Minister for home Kaito Aye, minister for PWD (Roads & Bridges) and parliamentary affairs Kuzholuzo (Azo) Nienu and several others also present on the occasion.
The state EOC will be the nerve center of NSDMA officials and other nodal department heads to assemble, take stock of a disaster situation and coordinate responses emergencies. It is repository of all the information and decision support systems. The role of the EOC is to provide a central location from which the government at any level can provide inter-agency coordination and prompt executive decision making for effective incident response. Decisions made at the EOOC affect the incident response as well as public response. The decision made at the EOC are not tactical decisions. Tactical decisions are made by the Incident Commander and the Command Staff at the incident spot. The EOC carries out coordinating function through information collection and evaluation, priority setting and resource management.
The EOC plays a critical role in support of the on-site response and is a well-managed operating system. However, EOCs can help meet the incident command’s critical needs in a coordinative way by establishing policy or resolving conflicting policies that may arise between the coordinating nodal departments/agencies, provide communication and messaging support, providing and prioritizing our resources since resource at hand will be limited, managing the public information as well as media since media will play an important role during and after disaster, authorize emergency expenditures to facilitate the on-going disaster recovery and to provide a better picture of how the incident is being taken care of. “Failure to do so in any of these areas can severely hamper the response efforts that may be going on during a disaster,” NSDMA source said.
The functions of the EOCs also include: Helping to establish a common operating picture that would help us tackle different disaster/crises, facilitating long term operations as well as a short term operations, improving continuity, collect information, analyse data received and give it to the right people, processing accurate information, differentiating between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ information, providing ready access to all available information as and when required, simplifying information analysis and verification and coordinating and promoting resource identification and assignment.
On role of SEOC on occurrence of disaster, the SEOC will function to its fullest capacity on the occurrence of disaster. The District EOC will be fully activated during Level O and Level 1 disasters. The activation would come into effect either on occurrence of disaster or on receipt of warning. On the receipt of warning or alert from any such agency which is competent to issue such a warning, or on the basis of reports from the deputy commissioner of the occurrence of a disaster, all community preparedness measures including counter- disaster measures will be put into operation.
As per the Government of India national framework for disaster management, the states were being assisted to set up control rooms/emergency operations centres at state and district level. Assistance for this was being given under the GOI-UNDP during Disaster Risk Management (DRM) project 2000-09. Equipment was also provided for these control rooms under the DRM to the selected states, of which Nagaland was one. In partnership with the National Bamboo Mission Application, Government of Nagaland entered into agreement to set up Emergency Operation Centres at the state level and in all 11 districts of Nagaland using Bamboo prefab materials.
