Hume Centre warnings 'illegitimate', meant to be 'discouraged': Wayanad Collectorate

The Wayanad Collectorate had all this while insisted that it had not received any "official information" from the Kalpetta-based Hume Centre for Ecology and Wildlife Biology on July 29. Since there is proof that the Hume Centre had issued the warning 16 hours before the landslide struck, the implication was that Hume's information was unofficial.

Now, the Wayanad Collectorate has gone a step further and discredited the services of the Hume Centre and similar other organisations that collect weather information using a people-centric participatory approach and promptly share them with local governments.

First, the Wayanad district administration said that its services are not required. In a reply furnished to RTI activist M T Thomas on November 1, it said that 'there are nodal agencies notified to provide disaster warnings'.

"Hume Centre for Ecology and Wildlife Biology is not one among the nodal agencies identified for issuing disaster alerts and warnings, and is not authorised to issue alerts or warning in the public domain or to public authorities regarding impending disaster or disaster situation," an official of the disaster management wing of the Wayanad Collectorate told Thomas in an RTI reply.
"Only an official agency is authorised to issue official alerts," the district administration asserted.

Then comes the tight slap on the face of regional organisations like Hume Centre that have been providing consistent and timely weather alerts to district administrations across Kerala. "There are many such organisations and individuals that have no legal legitimacy to issue any alerts or warnings but claim to have issued specific alerts or warnings. The Disaster Management Act, 2005, does not mandate the disaster managers to consider such warnings or alerts in any manner and is meant to discourage such unofficial alerts and warnings," the RTI reply states. This is both ironic and hypocritical.

In 2020, for instance, the Wayanad administration took serious note of a WhatsApp alert provided by the Hume Centre, an organisation with no "legal legitimacy" according to the administration, and swiftly relocated people from Mundakkai. Innumerable lives were saved.

Among the scientifically sound weather warning systems treated in a dismissive fashion by the district administration also include the highly reliable forecasts of CUSAT's Advanced Centre for Atmospheric Radar Research (ACARR). Since ACARR, like Hume Centre, is not a nodal agency authorised to issue warnings, the Wayanad administration’s inference is that even its forecasts are not supposed to be taken seriously.

The latest RTI reply also states that the administration did not receive any letter, email (deocwyd@gmail.com, dmwynd@gmail.com), WhatsApp message (807840977/9526804151), or phone call (toll-free 1077) on the official numbers of the District Emergency Operations Centre before the Mundakkai-Chooralmala landslides occurred.

This is technically correct, as the Hume Centre delivers its alerts on the WhatsApp group 'Wayanand Weather Forecast', which the Centre formed and has senior officials of the Wayanad district administration, including the collector, as members.

On July 28, the data generated by the Hume Centre indicated that Puthumala, the nearest weather station to Mundakkai, received 200 mm of rainfall, followed by another 130 mm overnight. Since a landslide could be triggered by approximately 600 mm of rain, the Hume Centre issued a landslide alert at 9 a.m. on July 29, 16 hours before the first earth explosion. True to Hume Centre's prediction, the area had received 572 mm of rain within 48 hours.

It was this "unofficial" warning, which can still be pulled out from the history of the 'Wayanand Weather Forecast' WhatsApp group that the Wayanad district administration has now said is meant to be discouraged.

"If they say it has to be discouraged, then why is the KSDMA (Kerala State Disaster Management Authority) conducting a workshop for amateurs? The KSDMA had also bought information from private weather stations like Skymet," a top climate scientist working for the government told Onmanorama. "On top of it, the global trend is people-centric warning methods. The trend is to decentralise, and here we have the state trying to centralise crucial weather information," he said.