ISLAMABAD, May 19: The city administration has decided to form the Capital Disaster Management Authority (CDMA) as described in the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) rules, sources told Dawn.
The sources said, in this regard, a meeting was held in the city administration offices in which it was ordered that preparation of the project’s concept should be initiated and the same be submitted to the chief commissioner of Islamabad for issuance of a notification.
According to the NDMA rules, every province and its district should have an indigenous disaster management authority.
The CDMA will work under capital administration and respond in cases of emergency under the supervision and direction of an ‘Incident Spot Commander’ who will be the assistant commissioner of the area where the disaster or incident takes place.
The Capital Development Authority (CDA) has been asked to designate a piece of land in Blue Area for the parking of emergency vehicles including firefighting vehicles and ambulances of the CDMA within a week as a model. The area will be strictly banned for general public and private vehicles and will be totally at the disposal of the CDMA.
All the departments concerned, including city administration, police, paramilitary forces, Pak Army, CDA, Rescue 1122, state-run hospitals, health emergency response units, city’s fire brigade and the NDMA will make Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for the CDMA by Monday.
Under the CDMA, the departments will not get involved in the blame game as they will work under one umbrella and it will be their collective responsibility to work as a team.
The NDMA would be asked to conduct a mock-exercise with the help of World Health Organisation (WHO) within 15 days of the preparation of the SOP to examine its practicality.
The meeting was attended by all the departments – Pakistan Army, police, CDA, NDMA, health emergency response unit and Rescue-1122 – who dealt with Bhoja Airplane crash last month.
They participants evaluated and identified their weaknesses and deficiencies to tackle the emergency, besides sharing the problems faced by each department and the lessons learnt from the incident.
It was revealed that about 200 ambulances of different government and welfare organisations reached the spot within minutes that was quite unnecessary.
As a result, massive traffic jam was witnessed which hampered the search operation and later posed difficulty in shifting the bodies from the spot.
The meeting decided to pool the rescue and search units and vehicles at a designated spot near the site of the incident till the completion of the operations to counter such inconvenience in future. The spot will be selected by the Incident Spot Commander and the units and the vehicles will move on his direction only.
Besides, it was also decided that the media, especially the news channels, would be asked to advise people not to rush to the site of the incident and try to keep away from the main roads to ensure speedy response to an emergency.