If Mumbai Police is no stranger to terror attacks, the civic and emergency services in the city, too, have seen more than their fair share of disasters — both natural and man-made. But just like the law enforcement and security agencies, even civic and medical services were caught on the wrong foot on November 26.

The lessons from dealing with the 2005 deluge, the 2006 blasts, and any number of building collapses, fires and monsoon flooding, it seemed, had not been imbibed as a multiplicity of agencies and a lack of clear leadership ensured confusion and delays on the ground and suffering for the victims and their loved ones.

A fire force without a guide or a leader outside the Taj Mahal Hotel, fire tenders with ladders that did not work, hospitals without enough ambulances, operation theatres without anaesthetists, it was a familiar story all over again. And all this, despite the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), the richest civic body in the country with an annual budget of nearly Rs 20,000 crore, having a clearly defined Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to deal with civic crises — one that was revised and fine-tuned in the aftermath of the July 2005 deluge.

The first misstep was with the implementation of the SOP itself. The SOP puts the BMC and its commissioner, an IAS officer, in charge of a crisis and all relevant departments and officials report to the Commissioner, including the fire department and 19 BMC hospitals. But then, the 26/11 attacks didn’t start as a civic crisis. And the BMC SOP hardly has anything to do with the police SOP, which, as reported in part 1 of this series, was more violated than practised.

... contd.