Last Friday, when the gales brought the city to a grinding halt, it was neither the blinding rain nor the wind that put a brake on the moving peak hour vehicular traffic. Fallen trees, twisted electric poles, hanging cables and of course the huge unipole near the Jubilee Hills check post, caused the havoc.
Yet, predominantly the trees resulted in traffic and power disruptions. Despite a crisis management group of top officials in place and an advance notice of at least half hour, civic authorities could not reach the trouble spots on time because of jams and the mopping up operations are, in fact, still continuing.
Quickly learning the lesson, Telangana Disaster Response and Fire Services Department, after a post-mortem, is purchasing 42 motored chainsaws to be handed over to all its bike-borne personnel so that they can rush to areas where trees crash onto the thoroughfares.
Each of the chainsaws costing about Rs.12, 000 each (total cost of Rs. 5 lakh) will be operational within a day or two and the personnel will be armed with gloves and eye protection equipment when they are asked to respond to any distress call.
“We realised that 90 per cent of calls we had received last week were for tree felling and our big trucks could not reach on time. Bikes will help us reach in real time as we could reach on time in three of the 17 distress calls received. We are only trying to help the GHMC,” says Director General Rajiv Ratan.
Senior officials had detailed review after about 1,350 trees fell in different parts of the Twin Cities and realised traffic got hit mainly due to these crashes on the roads and none to remove them on time.
“We are hoping our personnel on bikes can reach the affected spot on call, cut the trees into small pieces and take the help of the citizens nearby for dragging them aside. They can be transported later by the municipal corporation,” he explains.
The department is already using bikes for fire fighting helping it to reach troubled spots that much quicker to control fires before the big truck moves in.
It has a few chainsaws but they were too small in size to do an affective job for trees with big trunks.
Two litres of fuel will also be issued to the new chain saws of 28 inches and 78 cc for the work. All the 21 fire station bikes will have two each soon, he said.
