Last week, Insight reported that the world’s leading cyclone experts had estimated that two out of three people in East Pakistan disaster could have been saved of a Red Cross evacuation plan had been set in motion in the ample time from when the cyclone was first forecast. In the chaos which followed the cyclone it was impossible to establish just what went wrong. One of the first men into the devastating areas, however, was Gerhard Svedkund of the Swedish Red Cross. His first task, as a delegate of the League of Red Cross Societies in Geneva, was to organise relief But, as the man who had devised the evacuation plan, he was also determined to establish just why it had failed. His preliminary findings arrived in Geneva and Stockholm last week. So far the Red Cross has not released the report, but INSIGHT has learned that it reveals a tragic chain of human error. These are its principal findings.

On October 23 this year, three weeks before the disaster, the Red Cross ‘Operation Evacuation All-Out’ justified the time and money spend on it by working perfectly. American weather satellite and a radar weather station at Cox’s Bazar, on the Bay of Bengal, detected a cyclone with 100 mph winds heading for the Ganges delta. Radio Pakistan broadcast warnings, and the “team leaders” trained by the Red Cross alerted villagers and led them to high grounds, banks and even trees which, it had been calculated, would give them maximum protection from the greatest menace, a sudden rise in the sea level. Although the cyclone arrived with the predicted force it affected only a small area, and was accompanied by only a minor rise in the sea level. The figure of 300 dead was so insignificant by local standards that it barely attracted the notice of the world’s Press, though it did result in a depletion of the Red Cross’s emergency relief supplies. Most villagers returned home feeling, in the words of team leaders “that they had been called out for nothing at all”.

The evacuation plan had functioned perfectly but, in doing so, had fallen into what had been predicted by those who devised it as the most dangerous trap of all: loss of confidence. It was precisely this awareness of the need to sort out the dangerous cyclones from the rest which had prompted the purchase of the radar station.

Satellite Picture

At 9.36 am on the morning of November 12, the Pakistan meteorological office station at Dacca picked up a satellite picture of the cyclone which, 15 hours later, was to crash into the Ganges delta. It was 70 miles off the coast, but west of the delta. The radar station at Cox’s Bazar, which had tracked it for over a day, estimated its speed as 10 mph and the winds at its centre at about 100 mph. Its direction was uncertain, and for the past 24 hours it had seemed a greater threat to Calcutta than the delta. But when it is near the coast that a cyclone behaves most erratically and a positive threat to the delta could not be ruled out. The Radio Pakistan weather forecast continued to warn shipping and coastal areas, with estimated wind speeds on the Beaufort scale [BBC monitoring of the weather reports, however, indicates that at no time were definite wind speeds given].

It was now that the radar station at Cox’s Bazar, donated by the Swedish Save the Children Fund, should have come into its own. Unlike the satellites, it could keep a constant track of the cyclone. Early that evening it detected a dramatic change in the cyclone’s behaviour as it came into contact with a strong upper wind movement. It veered suddenly to the east and its forward speed picked up to a phenomenal 35 to 55 mph as it raced diagonally along the coast towards the delta with wind speeds at its centre reaching an estimated 150 mph.

Then an astonishing decision was made. Whether it was that of the radio stations broadcasting the forecasts or that of the forecasters themselves is not yet clear but all estimates of wind speed were now omitted from the forecasts. Instead the phrase “great danger” was constantly repeated. To the villagers, trained in evacuation procedures, there could have been nothing to indicate a full-scale emergency. Whoever made this decision, there is no doubt of the thought behind it. The “false alarm” of October 23 had induced a sceptical reaction to the dramatic information arriving from Cox’s Bazar. Radio Pakistan did not think, on the information they were given (whatever that was), that it was worth interrupting their programmes for what might well be just another cry of “wolf!". The illogical, and unfounded, excuse which was given afterwards was that “there were no longer any ships in the area”.

Even so some of the team leaders say they did not give the siren signal to their villagers to evacuate. But it was an exceptionally cold, dark and wet night. Many people had heard the earlier forecasts on communal radios and were not going to the roused from their beds twice in three weeks for nothing. The response to the sirens was virtually nil.

Full Inquiry

The hurricane wave which struck the sleeping villages was so huge that it is doubtful whether many people on the lower lying islands could have been saved. The prediction that the plan could have saved most people appears, however, to be justified for the larger islands and the coastal areas of the mainland. President Yahya Khan of Pakistan has ordered a full inquiry into the failure of the forecasters to issue the normal cyclone alert, to warn of the hurricane wave, or to give wind speeds on the Beaufort scale. If this was done intentionally the President has promised, “the culprit will hang”.