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Rendezvous with Rita
Aditya Goel (ex-320 K ‘04) writes on his
experience of Hurricane Rita |
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approaches to the
port, the port authority finally announced ‘Condition Whisky’. The
port was officially going to close by noon and all the ships in the
port and in the vicinity were to evacuate immediately and proceed
out to sea and safety. This was the 21st day of September.
Navigating through the ‘North-South fairway’ was a unique experience
in itself that day. Rarely do we get to see such colossal flow of
traffic in one direction. Scores of ships were going down south,
while we were heading north. On the radar screen, our ship seemed to
have gone astray, like a car zigzagging on the wrong side of the
road.
For a couple of days we kept drifting off the Mexican coast and
continuously monitored weather faxes and meteorological warnings.
Even though we kept a safe distance of over two hundred miles from
the storm, we could feel the gusting winds and rough seas, thunder
storms, lightning and incessant heavy rain showers. All on board
kept indoors and the old saying, ‘one hand for the ship and one hand
for self’, needed a new amendment as we really needed ‘both hands
for self’ even to stay steady in the lavatory. That was the closest
we got to Rita.
Rita finally hit the Sabine/ Lake Charles area in the state of Texas
during the wee hours of 24th September. By the time it made
landfall, it had weakened considerably. Though the damage on land
was not as substantial as that of Katrina, at sea Rita has left a
mark never to be forgotten by anyone working offshore in this part
of the world. |
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Village Adoption
Anish Dundoo |
Our search for a
village to adopt turned out to be quite a voyage of discovery for us
(Niladri Biswas, Pranav Swarup, Raunak Bawa, Vaibhav Bansal, Chetan
Agarwal, Yash Gandhi, myself and the escorts: KPB, JHH, PKN, MCJ,
AKC, SJB, AKS and NBD).
We began with some ‘village-hopping’, first visiting a solar-powered
hamlet where everything was handmade: cloth from paddy and
paperweights from polished stone, to name just two products. We then
went to Umedpur where we saw tubs of pickles being readied for
winter.
Finally, after a long and bumpy drive, we came to Fatehpur.
Spotlessly clean, houses newly whitewashed, and a warm welcome with
garlands...this was ‘our’ village. Environment-friendly Fatehpur has
a flour-mill which uses running water as its source of energy. When
asked what they felt they needed most, the villagers’ response was
prompt: bathroom facilities for the women. We look forward to our
future association with Fatehpur. |
Next Page |
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I don’t know if any of you has
ever wondered about the relation between destruction and women. I’m not
trying to be a male chauvinist here, but it is interesting to note how
some of the most deadly hurricanes this year in the Atlantic and the US/
Mexican Gulf happened to be named after women– Katrina, Ophelia and the
latest, Rita.
To begin my story, I am training on a merchant ship and on this
particular voyage we were headed from La Salina, which is a calm, serene
port on the northern coast of Venezuela, to Texas City which is an
industrial town and the oil hub of the US, with a full cargo of crude
oil. The voyage is just a short, five-day run, and before we have
departed, it’s almost time to arrive! But it wasn’t going to be so this
time...
Soon after departure from La Salina, we received weather faxes and
satellite messages about a low pressure area east of the Bahamas moving
westerly towards the Gulf of Mexico and expected to be a tropical storm.
It is not uncommon in the summer months to hear about tropical storms,
so it was just another one of many warnings. Rarely is there more than
one storm in a year, which gets upgraded into a hurricane and causes any
substantial damage. The people in the US were still in the recovery
process from the damage caused by Katrina when Rita was predicted to
develope into a hurricane. We continued tracking the movement of Rita as
it was going to be close to our route.
By the fourth day of our voyage, this tropical storm was already
‘Hurricane Rita’. We were only about two days ahead of it but we were
gaining distance. If we continued at this speed, we could be safely in
the port. But by the time we would finish discharging our cargo and move
out of the port we would meet the hurricane head-on. Rita was already
categorised as Scale 4 with cyclonic (anti-clockwise) winds gusting upto
over a hundred knots (about 180 kilometres per hour). It was predicted
to gain even more force as it still had a lot of distance to cover and a
large expanse of sea to gain energy from. With such strong winds, the
seas can be choppy enough to throw around a 300-metre long ship like a
matchbox.
The ship had a decision to make. While the safety of the ship and its
crew was the first priority, the commercial implications could not be
completely ignored. We continued on our voyage, always ensuring that we
had sufficient time to turn around, and be at a safe distance from the
hurricane, if we had to.
On the fifth and the final day of the voyage and during our final
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