A soggy Saturday sees commuters stranded

 

Mumbai: The rains may have been playing a game of hide-and-seek for the last couple of days, but Saturday was a soggy and wet start to the weekend. Colaba saw 107.7 mm of rainfall while Santa Cruz recorded 73.9 mm. Data from BMC’s rain meters recorded highest rainfall at Dharavi, Worli, BKC, Deonar and Dadar. And once again, citizens had to put up with huge traffic snarls, water-logged roads, and trains operating in fits and starts. A high-tide of 3.8m at 4.22 pm made matters worse, especially in the central suburbs, as tracks got flooded.
    Two people were injured in Bhayander when a slap of a building gave way and collapsed.
    Trains crawled at a snail’s pace and 40-minute journeys became two-hour-long nightmares.Central Railway services,both mainline and Harbour, crawled for the better part of Saturday and were delayed by more than an hour. By 6:30 pm, 38 services were cancelled on the mainline and 16 on the Harbour line. Commuters complained of being kept in the dark when services were cancelled. CR officials, however,said the main trouble spots were Sion, Kurla and Wadala. “In the morning and afternoon there were heavy showers between Dadar and Kurla. There was water logging, and trains ran at reduced speed,’’ said Chief PRO, S C, Mudgerikar. But the halts between stations were more than 30 minutes long, said irate passengers.
    Heavy rains at Dharavi resulted in the overflowing of the main nullah in the area, causing a spill-over on railway tracks at Sion and Kurla, said civic officials. Western Railway fared better; there were no cancellations, though trains were running 15 to 20 minutes late.
    The BMC, in anticipation of the high tide, had shut sluice gates at the outfalls—that prevent seawater from flowing back—to thwart tidal effects. “The fallout was that floods took longer than usual to recede. The gates were shut at Haji Ali and Lovegrove pumping stations to thwart the tidal effect,’’ said municipal commissioner Swadheen Kshatriya.
    Water-logging and traffic diversions were a common feature in parts of Parel, Hindamata, Dadar, King’s Circle, Sion’s Pratiksha Nagar, Sewri, Chunnabati, and Chembur. BEST buses were diverted to low-lying areas to help stranded passengers. Pumps had to be used in some of the worst-affected areas including Malad, Dahisar and parts of Kandivli. In the island city, pumps were operational at Kalachowkie, C P Tank, Sewri station and Byculla. The situation was so bad at Parel, that the corridors of the civic-run KEM Hospital were flooded. There was knee-deep water near the casualty and emergency wards and patients were moved to drier areas. The water was flushed out by evening.