The state capital’s wettest night this monsoon season literally brought death upon nine people, including a mother and her three sleeping children, and a group of workers who had built their huts too close to a soggy wall.
The city received 18.3 cm of rainfall from Friday evening to Saturday morning, the highest 12-hour precipitation, since 2000. As is now par for the course, rainwater flooded some 53 lakebed colonies across the city, which brought chief minister Kiran Kumar Reddy out of the comforts of his camp office to undertake a sympathy tour of the city.
Between 3 am and 4 am Saturday, 42 mm of rain poured down on the city, at a time when 32-year-old Farida and her three children, Sharmeen (6), Shamreen (4) and Muskan (2), were sound asleep in their house in Adityanagar in Miyapur. By 5 am, the rain-soaked walls could take it no more and crashed down on the family, killed them on the spot.
Ataround the same time, some 10 km away in the industrial area of Balanagar, the compound wall of a factory crashed down on a row of huts in which a group of labourers lay huddled. Five of them, Shantilal (20), Gopal (19) Kallu Khan (18), Babu (24), all migrants from Madhya Pradesh, and Laxmi (40), a municipal worker, were buried under the rubble. Here to eke out a livelihood by selling saplings and woolen blankets, the migrants had erected their huts by the main road but backed up close to the wall.
Across the city Friday night and Saturday morning, flood scenes were less grim but predictable as people baled out water from their living rooms, towed stalled cars, waded their way to hospitals and offices.
Low-lying colonies in Uppal, Manikonda, Malakpet, Meerpet, Uppuguda and Ramanthapur were like seas.
“We have identified 53 low-lying areas in the city. We have formed special teams to take up relief measures and also set up six control rooms to attend to emergencies,” Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) commissioner M T Krishna Babu said.
However, the wet night yet again exposed the GHMC’s claim that the storm water drainage system had been thoroughly dredged and cleared for the monsoon. “The GHMC is not bothered about the havoc being caused by the rains. Look at the water flowing over vehicles. We had to wade through knee-deep water,” said Mallesh, a resident of Balanagar.
With no less than 53 colonies reporing flooding, the civic utilities received numerous emergency calls. GHMC officials received as many as 70 such SOSes. In addition, K Kishan, an executive engineer in the disaster management wing of GHMC, said there were no less than 30 calls that trees had been uprooted and were blocking the roads. All night and morning, civic staff were stretched to attend to all the streaming complaints.
To make the GHMC’s misery worse, the Met forecast more rain for the city in the days ahead.
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