Blackout, evacuation in Dharamsala as IPL future remains uncertain

Around 20k evacuated in half-an-hour

Air raid alerts in the nearby areas had already forced a blackout and then began the toughest job of evacuating crowd safely. “The disaster plan was in place as district administration has prepared it well in advance,” Avnish Parmar, HPCA secretary, who played a key role in the evacuation process, told this daily. It took around half-an-hour to empty the capacity crowd but as per Parmar, it all went off smoothly.

“We have five main gates and 13 inner gates. As I said, the district administration was well prepared for any eventuality. The teams and others at the venue were evacuated simultaneously. The district administration had already formed teams to deal with the situation and we played the roles we have been assigned,” Parmar added.

Even if the evacuation process commenced shortly before Punjab’s innings came to a halt, fans had started leaving the Stadium from just after 9.00 PM. “I got a message about the situation in the surrounding areas so I decided to leave,” a fan who regularly attends IPL games in Dharamsala told this daily. Multiple people who were at the ground have since confirmed to this newspaper that the ground’s public address system wasn’t used so as to avoid panic. Instead, members from the operations team executed the evacuation plan.