The marauding rains of Mumbai

By 5-30pm, the rainfall was 94cm. The average rainfall in Mumbai for a whole rainy season, from July to September, remains at 200cm. Half of that 3 months' total rain fell within 3 hours. The rain created a solid screen of downpour cutting the visibility to zero. People looked outside the windows and saw nothing but the incessant flow of droplets of water. The neighbourhood, even the building next block was impossible to see through that solid sheet. Its effect was both disorientating and debilitating. And it caused such havoc that it would possibly remain beyond the imagination of someone who did not witness such a thing in life.

The rainfall is a record in hundred years or any number of years, so to say, because there has not been any recorded history of rainfall surpassing this. In the whole world's rainfall records, it is one of the 6 most intense ones. 94cm in a flat 180 minutes, the highest ever in a day in India.

The various ways that it took people's lives is also mind-numbing. First came the landslides. In the picturesque district of Raiged, around the town of Mahad, about 180km from Mumbai on the Mumbai-Goa highway, landslides claimed over 100 lives. In the city itself, a small hillock near Sakinaka in Andheri collapsed killing another hundred people's. Then came the drowning and snake bites... There were people falling in manholes, getting washed away and so on.

But the most tragic were the cases where people died trapped inside their own cars. It happened in many places, on the western highway close to Santa Cruz, On Andheri-Kurla road and at Chakala,. When the rain started, within no time traffic came to a standstill. Those who were in private cars did not have much hurry. They thought the rain would stop and the traffic would start moving soon. But it did not happen as they hoped. The rain came in with such force that the rise of water was much faster than what they anticipated. The more complacent passengers who rolled up the windows and tried to doze through the rain did not notice two things -- one, water was rising very fast around their cars and two, they were breathing less and less oxygen as their cabins were closed off. Some of them woke up to see water splashing outside the window shields. They tried to open the doors and get out. The hydrostatic pressure outside the doors made it impossible. Then they tried to roll down the windows and escape. But those having powered windows could not do that as water got into the electricals and damaged the circuits. As they fought to escape, the fear and lack of oxygen caused them to collapse soon. Eventually when help arrived next day, they were all dead.

A man told me a horrific story. He saw three people, two men and a lady in a car, dead. Hours before, they saw their hands on the windshields and window glasses. Everyone thought they were clearing the mist on the glass to have better visibility. But they were actually trying to break out of the car which they could not do. One of the boys wrote a letter describing his last minutes. It was most pathetic of all that I heard or read or saw in this rain.

Amidst all this, a supports ship collided with ONGC's oil platform named Bombay High North, about 160km inside the Arabin sea, rupturing the gas pipeline and setting it on fire. There were over 300 people on work and it was feared that only few survived.

But finally when the rescue was complete, the death toll came down to much less in number.

The final tragedy of this Mumbai rain is the stampede in Neheru Nagar at Juhu and Nirmal Nagar at Bandra and in Guregaon area. Someone shouted 'Tsunami, Tsunami...' sometime at night and people, already distraught by 72 hours of sleep and food deprivation and witnessing the most dreadful downpour of the century, started running out of narrow lanes in the darkness: 18 died in Neheru Nagar, 3 in Nirmal Nagar and 2 in Guregaon in the hysteria and subsequent stampede. A second rumour about bursting of Powai dam set off another panic in the mob. The whole city was on edge and things were only happening from bad to the direction of worse.

Though the rain had stopped, there were occasional relapses. One afternoon it rained quite a bit flooding all those areas which cleared of water the previous day. The situation was still very severe.

I would quote The Time of India to convey the gravity of the situation. It is about the suburban township of Kalyan.

'If London earned the sobriquet of the City of Black Death after it was devastated by the great plague of 1665, this mini township of Kalyan could well inherit the title days. today. Afloat with tones of garbage and hundreds of carcasses of humans and buffaloes, casualties of flood that have turned this township into the stinking drain, Kalyan has gone without power, drinking water and basis commodities for the last four days. It is a miracle that the 500,000 people living here are still surviving without any grave illness....'

Mumbai Mirror has published a picture showing Amitabh Bachchan almost in tears. His villa 'Jalsa' got deluged and his valuable collections got destroyed. Leaving his shooting schedule, the actor spent two days salvaging his favourite articles from the basement office. No one was spared from the engulfing havoc that rattle the city for few days.

Golam Kibria is an Auditor of BVQI, currently under training in Mumbai.