FATAL LAPSES AT SEA

Cyclone Tauktae left 86 people dead in India’s worst-ever offshore disaster. Making matters yet more tragic is that early warnings made this entirely avoidable

- SANDEEP UNNITHAN

THE GLOOMY PORTENT to India’s worst-ever offshore disaster was a series of satellite images. On May 15, meteorologists in the India Meteorological Department (IMD) in Delhi didn’t have the slightest doubt what the INSAT3D imagery was showing them. The menacing low-pressure vortex they saw heading north just off India's west coast was an ‘extremely severe cyclonic storm’, likely one of the biggest cyclones to hit the west coast in decades. The IMD alert that day sounded the warning as the cyclone had begun barrelling towards Gujarat, right over the vital oil fields of Mumbai High operated by the petroleum ministry PSU, the Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC).

Discovered in the mid-1960s, the oil fields of Mumbai High yield 170,000 barrels a day, about two-thirds of India’s domestic oil production. The crude is drilled out of the continental shelf by massive drill ships. Supporting them is a large ecosystem of hundreds of supply vessels, tugs and helicopters that ferry crewmembers—welders, divers and others—to and from the fields. Chief among these are accommodation work barges, shallow-draft vessels used as floating hotels to house project personnel. These are ‘dumb’ vessels, meaning they have no propulsion and have to be towed by tugboats, and are anchored close to drill rigs.

On May 16, over 90 vessels that were out at sea frantically began sailing for the safety of the shore. “By May 15-16, all concerned government agencies were aware that Tauktae was going to be of higher intensity than previous cyclones,” a government official says. On May 17, Tauktae tore across the Mumbai coast—a wall of wind and sheeting rain screaming along at speeds of over 180 kmph, accompanied by waves as high as a five-storey building.