MONSOON FURY LEAVES TRICITY AFLOAT

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, August 21

The tricity region comprising Chandigarh, Mohali and Panchkula woke up to the season’s heaviest and highest-ever rainfall recorded in the past at least 17 years. It threw normal life out of gear and poured lots of pain and misery on residents.

Since it was morning time, school and office-goers were the worst-hit and a majority of them could not reach their destinations; resultantly a thin presence was witnessed at educational institutions and workplaces.

The downpour started around 7 am and within an hour, the tricity was almost deluged. Mohali was the worst hit as it virtually floated. The 200-foot-wide road leading to the international airport turned into a full-fledged river with gushing waters taking a toll on the moving vehicular traffic. With the Airport road, which was constructed two years ago at a whopping Rs 170 crore (land cost excluded), disappearing under up to 4-foot-deep rainwater, vehicles started floating like unmanned boats in the heavy current of water. Such was the situation that the occupants of vehicles afloat could not even come out of their vehicles, which went totally out of their control and led to accidents.

Hundreds of vehicles got stuck on the 4-km stretch of the Airport road-turned-water body close to Radha Soami Satsang Bhawan and it was only after two boundary walls of the bhavan were razed and its gates opened that the gushing water level started coming down.

However, it was only after several hours of ordeal that the situation started limping back to normal. Till 3 pm, the road was still under knee-deep water. Elsewhere in the tricity, rainwater entering houses, shops, godowns and even government offices remained the order of the day. This resulted in heavy loss of property. However, no loss of life was reported from any part of the tricity till reports last came in.

In Chandigarh, the situation was a bit better than Mohali but almost all roads and roundabouts had turned into water bodies. The 134-mm rainfall (Mohali excluded and the Met Department, in the absence of any observatory, estimating it to have crossed even the 200-mm mark), which the weatherman recorded from 7 am to 1 pm in Chandigarh once again proved beyond doubt that there was a total collapse of the drainage system, which turned out to be almost non-existent. 

Even as new UT SSP (Traffic) Shashank Anand led from the front and himself manned the badly blocked vehicular traffic on city roads, all major junctions – Tribune Chowk, Labour Chowk, the ISBT, Sector 17, JW Marriott, Press Chowk, Transport Chowk, Madhya Marg and southern pockets of the city -- witnessed heavy traffic jams with traffic signals conking out and traffic policemen seldom seen to clear the logjam.   

At several places, trees and poles (both electricity and telephone) got uprooted and damaged vehicles. This also snapped the power and water supply, besides telephone services, in several parts of the tricity. Several roads developed big cracks while some caved in various parts. As far as Panchkula was concerned, it also witnessed a flood-like situation. Ajoy Kumar, whose Mercedes Benz E-Class remained afloat for a couple of hours on the Airport road, said, “It was a second life for me.” “We learn that crores of rupees are spent every year on maintaining the drainage system in the tricity, but today’s situation made it evident that all such expenditure went down the drain,” said Nandini Seth, who, along with her 10-year-old daughter, remained stuck on city roads for three hours.   Officials termed it an “unexpected and unavoidable” situation, which was handled “timely”.