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TN forest fire: State official, FSI spar over alert timing
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SME Times News Bureau | 13 Mar, 2018
The Forest Survey of India's
(FSI) SMS warning about hot spots/fire alert in Kurangani Hills in Tamil
Nadu's Theni district was received just before midnight on Sunday, a
senior state Forest Department official said on Tuesday. However the FSI
said they had sent the intimation on Sunday afternoon.
On
Sunday, a group of 36 trekkers were caught up in a massive forest blaze
in Kurangani Hills, resulting in the death of 11 persons and several
injured seriously.
"The SMS alert from FSI came only at 11.46
p.m. on Sunday. The FSI also sends email alerts. On Sunday, the
attachment did not open. But many times the attachments sent by FSI do
not open. Hence we depend on SMS alerts as it comes directly to the
mobile phones of many state government officials," the Forest Department
official, who did not want to be identified, told IANS.
According
to the official, the Tamil Nadu government is in the process of signing
an MoU with the Hyderabad-based National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC),
part of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), for such warnings.
"Once
the MoU is signed then we can get the data from NRSC directly. We have
the capability to decode the data sent by NRSC," the official added.
Responding
to the charge, a senior official of the Dehradun-based FSI told IANS
over phone: "We alert the state government officials in two modes -
email and SMS."
Requesting anonymity as the official was not
authorised to speak to the media, the official added: "We just checked
the email sent to the Tamil Nadu official. The email was generated at
3.37 p.m. on March 11 and was sent."
"The email was forwarded to
another computer system and the attachment to the mail opened without
any hitch," the official added.
According to the FSI official,
data is gathered from satellites that pass over India. The first
satellite pass was at 1.57 p.m. and the secondat 1.59 p.m.
Meanwhile,
ISRO Chairman K. Sivan told IANS that the "Tamil Nadu forest fire was
picked up by NRSC in the afternoon. The data was sent to FSI soon after
that. We have a MoU with FSI. The FSI in turn sends the alerts through
SMS."
Queried about the delay in SMS as voiced by the Tamil Nadu
official, the FSI official said that is done by a vendor and it is not
possible to get the time of delivery.
According to the official,
within 40 minutes of the receipt of data from NRSC, emails would be
generated by FSI and within few minutes after that, the SMS would be
sent.
"There are around 18,000 registered mobile numbers with FSI
for data. Any person can register his mobile number on our website and
also specify his area of interest so that the customised data is sent
through SMS," the official added.
"The FSI also provides bulk
registration facility so that a nodal officer in a government department
can register numbers of even beat level officials so that information
can be reached to him/her," FSI official added.
According to FSI
official, while many states have registered mobile numbers of over 2,000
officials, Tamil Nadu with less than 250 registered numbers ranks low
in the overall picture.
"The state can register the mobile
numbers of beat level officials so that critical information can be
reached to them," the FSI official said.
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