Evacuation Decisions 30 Hours Before Cyclone Landfall
A mandal on the Andhra coast has nine villages and about 14,000 people. The forecast says a cyclone will make landfall in 30 hours with a storm surge of 2 to 2.5 metres and winds of 110-120 km/h. Four concrete shelters on elevated ground together hold 3,000 people; almost all other housing is kutcha. One causeway on the only road out of three villages submerges at a 2 m surge and is expected to be impassable about 8 hours before landfall. About 400 fisherfolk own 60 boats worth 8-15 lakh rupees each and say they will not leave them. A 2019 warning produced no landfall, and people remember two nights in shelters for nothing. The population includes about 90 women in late pregnancy and 300 elderly or disabled people. The Class X public examination is scheduled in a school that is one of the four shelters.
1. Set out the order of evacuation for the first 12 hours and justify why shelters should not be filled on a first-come-first-served basis.
Read the worked answer
Work backwards from the closing of the causeway. Landfall is at hour 30 and the causeway is impassable from about hour 22, so the three villages beyond it must be moved first; if they are left to hour 24 they are cut off and the rescue problem becomes a disaster of its own.
Order: (1) the three villages beyond the causeway, starting with people in kutcha houses inside the 2.5 m surge line; (2) the 90 women in late pregnancy and the 300 elderly or disabled people, who need transport and cannot queue, and who should go to shelters with a health worker rather than to relatives' houses; (3) remaining villages in the surge zone; (4) households outside the surge line, who may shelter in pucca buildings.
Shelters must not be first-come-first-served because capacity is 3,000 for 14,000 people. If shelters fill with the nearest and healthiest households, those least able to cope are left in kutcha houses in the surge zone. The correct rule is to reserve shelter space for people with no vertical alternative, and to direct the rest to identified two-storey pucca buildings and relatives' houses, with a list kept at each shelter. That means an allocation decision before the crowd arrives, not at the gate.
2. The fisherfolk refuse to leave 60 boats worth 8-15 lakh rupees each. Decide what the administration should do and justify the communication strategy.
Read the worked answer
The refusal is rational, not irrational: a boat is the household's entire capital, and the 2019 false alarm taught people that official warnings can be wrong. A strategy that begins by calling them careless will fail.
Practical steps: identify a designated creek or raised ground where boats can be hauled and lashed within 12 hours, and say publicly where it is; register each boat and assign a watch rota so owners know someone is responsible; move boats in groups while there is still time, because hauling 60 boats takes hours. Enforcement should be the last step, not the first, and should rest on the legal power to evacuate, applied to people rather than to property.
Communication should be specific and dated: state surge height, wind speed, the hour the causeway closes, and what will happen to a boat left at the jetty in 2.5 m of surge. Acknowledge 2019 explicitly and explain what has changed in the forecast. Use fishermen's own association leaders as messengers, because trust travels through peers, not through loudspeakers.
The judgement being tested is that evacuation is a negotiation with rational people under uncertainty, and that credibility, once spent, must be rebuilt by being concrete rather than by being louder.
3. The examination hall is in one of the four shelters. The collector can postpone the examination or use only the three other shelters. Decide and justify.
Read the worked answer
Postpone and use all four shelters. The comparison is between an examination and a storm surge.
If only three shelters are used, capacity falls from 3,000 to roughly 2,250, and the shortfall has to be absorbed by exactly the households least able to find a pucca building - the elderly, the disabled and the poorest. The examination can be held on a later date through the board's existing rescheduling mechanism; a life lost in a surge cannot be recovered. The cost of postponement is administrative and is borne by the state; the cost of crowding is borne by the weakest.
A counter-argument worth crediting: the school is on elevated ground and the examination hall may be a separate block, so partial use is possible. That is a real option only if the blocks are physically separable, the shelter space is genuinely sufficient without the hall, and the roads serving it are safe at hour 20. Those are factual tests, not preferences.
So the decision rule is: evacuate the hall unless separable space and safe access are both verified. A strong answer states the rule and the facts that would reverse it, rather than simply choosing safety over exams.