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Introduction
Cyclone is a regular annual phenomenon in coastal Orissa. On 29 October 1999, a devastating super cyclone caused immense damage to houses, agricultural land, electricity supply, transport, and telecommunication networks. Thousands of people lost their lives and almost two million houses were destroyed in the districts of Ganjam, Puri, Jagatsinghpur, Kendrapara, Bhadrak, Balasore, Cuttack and Jajpur ([5] NCRMP, 2005). After that disaster, Orissa State Disaster Mitigation Authority and IIT Kharagpur jointly conducted a study (named hereafter as the OSDMA-IIT study) on the need, design and location of multipurpose cyclone shelters along the 480 kilometres long coastline of Orissa, which covered a 10-kilometre wide zone from the High Tide Line. It was estimated that more than 500 cyclone shelters were required to accommodate about 1.1 million people of 1,845 villages that are situated along the coastline. The study identified 512 locations for building cyclone shelters, including 23 locations already identified by the International Red Cross Society for the same purpose ([4] IFRC, 1999). The remaining 489 cyclone shelters were to be built in six districts, namely Balasore, Bhadrak, Kendrapara, Jagatsinghpur, Puri and Ganjam.
The OSDMA-IIT study used a method of dividing the 10 kilometre-wide belt into square grids, each having 10 square kilometre area. The ideal location of the cyclone shelter was at the centroid of the square. Hence, the length of the diagonal of each square was 4.47 kilometres and the distance between a corner and the centroid of the square grid was approximately 2.25 kilometres, which was the maximum distance, considered as easy for a villager to travel to reach the cyclone shelter after receiving the warning of an impending cyclone. The total population of all the villages included in a grid and the total available plinth area of the double-storied private and public buildings were calculated. Using a thumb rule that one square foot plinth area is required to accommodate a person in a shelter, estimates were made for the required number of persons to be accommodated in a cyclone shelter and the size of the shelter in a grid. Considering the cost factor, the cyclone shelters were constructed only with discrete predetermined capacities, like 500, 1,000, 2,000, and 3,000 square feet. Availability of road network, drinking water, medical facilities, and presence...