FATAL LAPSES AT SEA
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 INSAT-3D 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,
