Terrible Tuesday. Review on Mumbai Monsoon Disaster 2005

That's what all the papers are calling it. It's supposed to have rained nonstop for 24 hours on that fateful tuesday and the record stands at over 900 mm of rainfall. That's in the top ten list of'heaviest rainfall in 24 hrs' in the country. I did'nt personally lose any belongings nor was my family affected even though our flat is on the ground floor. I guess it's because we live on a slope.

I'm just glad I was at home that day. I had a monday and tuesday off from work that month and so I sat by the living room widow that monday, wondering when the rain would end. It did'nt. It rained rhe whole night and most of the next day as well.

My watchman told me that night that everyone from our building who went to work that morning had'nt returned yet-and he told me this at midnight on monday. The next day was no different. My family and I were glued to the T.V watching the news and waiting. It's not unusual for the city to come to a standstill on account of rain. In fact, it happens every year. There's always at least one day every year when the city gets a lashing for a day and road and rail networks get disrupted. But you have to keep in mind that this only lasts for a few hours and does'nt affect the city in the  long run.

But terrible tuesday was different. With the non stop rain, the cities main roads, it's arterial roads got flooded, and traffic piled up for kilometers on end. Trains and tracks were equally affected. I was quite moved by a picture that appeared in the paper showing thousands of train commuters stranded at Victoria Terminus waiting for a train. Even phone networks were down. Low lying suburbs like Kalina and Kurla got flooded. The Air India colony was one of the worst affected. Some home were submerged by ten feet if water. And then two weeks after it all ended came the diseases-leptospirosis and dengue. The significance has finally hit me. What happened was in fact a natural calamity and we need to treat it like one.

So how do we prevent it from happening again? I'm not sure we can. But we can certainly try to reduce the effect of similar heavy rainfall in the future. How? By not using plastic bags so often. Also, if we do use them, let's try to act like civilized people and not throw them in the roadside gutter along with other garbage that we treat in the same sad way. Let's make an effort to treat all organic garbage ang get rid of all non-organic garbage in the proper way- in a bin, not on the street to get washed away and clog our drains. Maybe we can also harvest some of that rainwater. That might prevent flooding to some extent. Better to have the water on our roofs rather that around our ankles on the street.

Daniel