An overnight spell of torrential rainfall, the heaviest in nearly four decades, inundated Kolkata and its outskirts on Tuesday morning and killed 11 people, leaving the 335-year-old metropolis struggling to stay afloat and seriously jeopardising preparations for the Durga Puja festival.
Officials from the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said that the rainfall – 98mm per hour – was just shy of the threshold for a cloudburst (100mm an hour). But the six-hour spell marooned a vast swathe of the city of 15 million people, cut off entire neighbourhoods, paralysed rail, road and air services, drowned vehicles and poured columns of gushing water into people’s homes and apartments.
“I was supposed to take my mother to a doctor, but had to cancel that appointment when I saw on TV that some people were electrocuted on the waterlogged roads,” said Moumita Biswas, a resident of Kalikapur in east Kolkata.
The deluge — 251.4 mm in less than 24 hours — was the highest since 1986 and sixth-highest single-day rainfall in the last 137 years. The intensity of the rainfall varied from 332mm in the southern suburb of Garia to 195mm in the north Kolkata neighbourhood of Thanthania.
It turned arterial roads into rivers, snapped Metro and local train services, and damaged some of Kolkata’s most famous outdoor puja pandals ahead of the Durga Puja beginning this weekend. It also exposed the poor state of drainage systems in the city.
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It continued to drizzle throughout the day on Tuesday as authorities scrambled to pump water out of residential neighbourhoods and commercial buildings. More rain is expected on Thursday.
“I have never seen rain like this. Ten people have died, of whom nine due to electrocution by open or unattended wires. Eight people died in Kolkata and two others in adjoining areas of Shashan in North 24 Parganas and Amtala in South 24 Parganas,” chief minister Mamata Banerjee said. An eleventh person died of electrocution at Narendrapur on the southern outskirts of Kolkata in the evening.
Between 2.30am and 5.30am, the intensity of rain was higher in Kolkata’s southern and eastern parts. Waterlogging in the Metro Railway’s Blue Line (Dakshineswar to Shahid Khudiram stations) disrupted services on certain sections. Suburban train movements in the Sealdah South, Sealdah North as well as the main sections were affected. Train services were partially affected at Howrah and Kolkata stations as tracks were waterlogged.
“The associated cyclonic circulation now extends upto 7.6 km above mean sea levels. It is likely to persist over the same region during next 24 hours and become less marked thereafter,” the IMD said in a special bulletin. “Another low pressure area is likely to form over northwest and adjoining central Bay of Bengal around September 25,” the bulletin added.
Government and private offices, hospitals, schools and colleges were marooned, as were some roads, forcing drivers to leave their vehicles behind after the engines stalled, deputy commissioner of police (traffic) Y Shrikant said.
“I had to walk all the way from my office at Ultadanga (in east Kolkata) to Park Circus (in the south) because there was no public transport,” said Sailen Panda, a sales representative.
Declaring an emergency amid preparations for the Durga Puja that formally begins on Sunday, Banerjee opened a control room at Nabanna, the state secretariat, and asked the Kolkata Municipal Corporation to pump out the rainwater through the city’s drainage system that discharges the water in the Hooghly river.
“Kolkata’s drainage system is very good. But there will be a high tide in the river from Tuesday afternoon. This will slow down the drainage work for several hours,” she said.
Banerjee declared holiday at all state-run schools and asked the universities to hold online classes. “I request private schools to prepone their already declared Puja holidays by two days,” she said.
The crisis triggered a political row with the Bharatiya Janata Party accusing the Trinamool Congress government of handling the situation poorly. “The IMD issued an orange warning but Mamata Banerjee and Kolkata mayor Firhad Hakim were sleeping. They cannot blame nature and get away. Millions are suffering because of the government’s failure,” BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari said.
The chief minister blamed CESC. “I talked to Sanjiv Goenka [chairman of RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group that owns CESC] and told him that the electrical cables should be modernised and maintained. Money cannot replace life but CESC must give a compensation of ₹5 lakh each to the kin of those who died. We will also help those families,” said the CM.
She also blamed the Centre-owned Metro Railway, saying raw materials left at construction sites clogged the drainage lines. “Metro Railways should remove the construction materials,” said Banerjee.
The Metro authorities did not make any statements.
A CESC spokesperson said: “We investigated the eight deaths in Kolkata and found that five of these accidents happened inside residential buildings due to faults in internal wiring. The remaining three people died after touching street light posts which are not maintained by CESC.”
“As a precautionary measure, we disconnected power connections to several heavily inundated areas. Around 50% of these connections were restored in the afternoon when the water level receded,” said the spokesperson.
Banerjee also said that water carrying capacity of the Hooghly river reached a limit because water from the dams of the Centre-owned Damodar Valley Corporation in Jharkhand and flood water from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh also flows through the Ganga.
“We have repeatedly told the Farakka barrage authorities to dredge the bed of the Ganga at Farakka but nothing has been done. West Bengal is shaped like the hull of a boat. All water coming downstream lands here,” Banerjee said.
“This is not the time to play politics. We don’t say a word when Delhi and
Maharashtra are flooded or when landslides claim lives in Uttarakhand. Nature is playing havoc across the world. It is not controlled by us,” Banerjee added.
Across the city, 3,000-odd puja pandals were submerged.
“Last-minute preparations were on and pandal-hoppers had started visiting. This is a major setback. When the water receded in some areas we found that it had damaged painstakingly done artwork,” said Saswata Basu, general secretary of the Forum for Durgotsab, which represents around 500 pujas in Kolkata and Howrah.
