Tamil Nadu - Chennai   

This problem continues to ‘stagnate’

— Photo: M. Vedhan

MANOEUVRING: The outpatient ward of Burns Department of Kilpauk Medical Hospital has become inaccessible after the recent rains.

CHENNAI: Stagnant rainwater near the outpatient section of the burns ward and the diabetology ward of Government Kilpauk Hospital is worrying doctors.

“When patients from the burns ward have to be shifted on stretchers to the operation theatre in the gynaecology ward they have to be transported through the stagnant water. It is hazardous not only for the patients but also the hospital employees,” a doctor said.

As water stagnates at the entrance to the ward, sand piled up and wooden planks were placed to help people walk. Sandbags from the road leading to the ward act as steps.

A hospital employee said, “Stagnation occurs every year but water recedes in a few days. This time, it has not drained for a week and now it has turned green.”

Doctors said the Public Works Department officials maintaining the buildings told them that there was a block in the drainage system.

A similar sight greets visitors to the diabetology outpatient clinic, situated behind the burns ward. Around 800 patients visit the clinic every day and most of them go to the pharmacy unit across the clinic for free medicines.

They too have to walk through the slush. A cement stormwater drain next to the building housing the diabetology ward runs half full with sullied rainwater.

The 16-acre hospital houses hostels for students of the medical and nursing colleges and nursing staff quarters. Hospital authorities said that the Ozone Pond maintained by the Fisheries Department abutting the hospital was creating the problem.

Residents in the Chetpet slum behind the hostel are also part of the problem, the officials said. They used the college premises as a thoroughfare until a compound wall was erected in 1986. Since then, when the pond overflows, water stagnates on the college premises.

The hospital was given 46 grounds of land behind the college by the then Chief Minister M.G. Ramachandran in 1982 to build nursing quarters but the slum dwellers had allegedly prevented its occupation. Early this week, when the Public Works Department officials installed a pump to drain the water into the pond, the slum residents allegedly cut off the hose.

Officials said that since the premises was three feet below road level, water does not drain easily.

The Panagal Palace on the college premises was demolished recently. On Saturday, machines were used to build a trench to hold the stagnant water until a solution was found, the officials said.

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