Downpour brings Mumbai to a halt

Mumbai: Over the last 24 hours, Mumbai recorded a jaw-dropping 231.44mm of rain.

With incessant rain since Sunday night, traffic was severely hit during morning peak hours on Monday as many areas such as Hindmata, Sion, Maheshwari Udyan, King’s Circle, Pratiksha Nagar, Kurla, Chembur, Filterpada-Powai, Mankhurd, Bandra, Milan subway, Irla, Malad subway, S.V. Road and Goregaon experienced waterlogging.

So much so that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) had to use dewatering pumps at 183 places across the city to discharge the accumulated water.

Arterial roads such as the Eastern Express Highway and Western Express Highway, too, witnessed serpentine traffic jams through the day as heavy spells led to poor visibility along certain stretches.

Suburban trains on central and western railway were delayed by 10 to 20 minutes, while airlines such as Jet Airways and Vistara were delayed due to congestion in air-traffic owing to the heavy downpour. The city witnessed seven incidents of wall collapse on Monday. At Andheri (east), a part of a balcony collapsed at Jadhav Chawal behind Sahar police station, injuring one Rajkumari Gaud (37), who is in a critical condition at Cooper Hospital. Near Gol Masjid at Kalbadevi, a part of the Anandi Lal Poddar Marg caved in due to bursting of an underground water pipeline.

There was waterlogging in several parts of Mira-Bhayandar, exposing the Mira-Bhayandar municipal corporation’s apathy towards controlling debris dumping in the region and its shoddy pre-monsoon preparations.

The common people were the most inconvenienced as they had to wade through knee-deep water in several parts of the twin-city, with little or no motor pumps to drain out the accumulated water and traffic snarls in many places.

In Raigad district, the Pali-Khopoli highway was shut down after nearly half of the road caved in and washed away at Khuravale village due to incessant rain. Residents said that the roadwork had been sub-standard and that complaints had fallen on deaf ears.

Traffic on the Mumbai-Goa highway, too, was affected due to caving in of a bridge near Karnala. Although the authorities tried to divert the traffic, the jam caused a great deal of inconvenience to commuters.

An 18-year-old Nagendra Nagarjun died after falling into a nullah at Evershine Nagar in Malad (west), whereas 15-year-old Kiran Ghaywat (15) died after the wall of a nearby sewerage treatment plant collapsed on his family's home at Ulhasnagar.