The Wayanad District Tourism Promotion Council (DTPC) has set a model for ensuring the safety of tourists who visit the hill district by constituting trained rapid response teams (RRT) in all tourism centres under various departments.
The Wayanad district administration, in association with the council, had launched a disaster-resilient tourist destination project under the Wayanad tourism’s safe tourism campaign recently and the RRTs were set up as a part of the campaign.
The project envisaged enabling all the tourism destinations in the district to deal with any disaster, K.G. Ajesh, secretary, DTPC, Wayanad, told The Hindu. Mr. Ajesh claimed that it was for the first time in the country that such RRTs were constituted exclusively for tourism destinations.
Each tourist destination would have a separate disaster management plan, a specially trained emergency response team and warning systems based on the geographical characteristics of each area under the project, he said.
Training programme
A training programme for 125 select RRT members from major 25 tourism centres under various departments in the district was held at the Karlad Lake here on Wednesday, P.M. Ratheesh Babu, manager, DTPC, said.
Experts from the National Disaster Response Force and District Disaster Management Authority trained the RRT members on how to deal with flood situations, evacuation at the time of disaster and rescue operations in water with locally available materials, Mr. Ratheesh added.
They were also trained on the basics of first aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), a life-saving technique that’s useful in many emergencies such as a heart attack or near drowning, he said.
