Durban – The city of Durban’s disaster management plan has been poorly received by community and environmental activists, who believe it has not been adequately updated in years.
The city sent the plan – which is also available on the municipal website – to The Mercury following queries by the newspaper, but declined to answer specific questions.
Environmental experts said it was unacceptable that there were no early warning siren and public address systems in place in South Durban Basin.
They said the plan relied too heavily on commercial radio to communicate information to the public in the case of a disaster.
The city said the plan had been endorsed by the Deputy City Managers Forum in 2012, and was ratified in 2013.
It was revised last year, and is supposed to be reviewed annually.
* According to the plan, the city needed to allocate responsibilities to roleplayers and co-ordinate the carrying out of those responsibilities.
* It was responsible for the establishment of a disaster operations centre to manage incident-related information for response teams in the case of a major incident.
* The health department at the city had to ensure that the disaster risk management plans were compiled and maintained within the unit. It was also tasked with assisting with plume dispersion modelling and tracking.
* In the event of an incident, the specific company affected would implement its own emergency plan.
“This will include the summoning of assistance from designated municipal service departments and other support agencies.”
* Depending on the severity of the incident, it might be required to initiate a city strategic response or command.
“There are currently no early warning siren and public address systems installed in the residential areas of the South Durban Basin. Public education programmes inform the public to go inside and turn on the radio. The primary means of communication with the public will be through local radio stations,” it said.
The city said that the two basic public protection strategies were evacuation and sheltering-in-place.
“The concept of sheltering-in-place involves seeking to limit an individual’s exposure by seeking refuge. This refers to leaving residents in the protection of their homes with instructions to close windows and doors, shut down outside vent systems and other agent-excluding precautions.”
Under certain conditions evacuation was the preferred protective action. “This is subject to evacuation being accomplished prior to reaching the tip-over point of exposure risk.”
Community activists said on Thursday they believed the measures were insufficient.
Environmental epidemiology specialist and environmental health campaign manager at NGO Groundwork, Rico Euripidou, told The Mercury that when major incidents happened, especially in heavily industrialised areas, the emergency services tasked with protecting people and the environment needed to be informed by an emergency preparedness plan.
“The plan will dictate how the public should be informed about health risks, channels of communication, how to assess and measure risk, who and how to undertake environmental sampling to inform risk assessment, how to communicate with schools, hospitals, vulnerable populations etc whether by radio, or other means.”
Euripidou said the organisation was not convinced that the plan had been updated in many years.
He also said that the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance had been demanding it be updated for the last 10 years.
“I feel that in this case (of the fire) the city had been caught with their pants down. There were no periodic announcements to let the public know what was happening and no advisories warning them what the next step was.”
Looking at the management plan he said it appeared to be more of a framework, and offered little in the way of practical guidelines.
Activist and co-ordinator of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, Desmond D’Sa, said there was no thought provided to the involvement of community, or a rehearsal of plans.