Due to power failure for the second day in a row and a continuous drizzle, motorists had a harrowing time on the Capital’s roads on Tuesday. Huge traffic jams were reported at several places due to water-logging and non-functional traffic lights. Around 800 traffic signal across the city had stopped functioning.
The tunnel road which connects Terminal 1 and Terminal 3 of Indira Gandhi International Airport was closed for some time due to flooding.
“The rainwater from National Highway 8 and Mahipalpur entered the Commercial Project Development (CPD) area, also known as Aerocity, which then overflowed on to the road near the tunnel on Northern Access Road causing the road to be partially flooded,” said an airport spokesperson.
The spokesperson clarified the rainwater from Mahipalpur and NH-8 overflowed into the CPD because of maintenance works carried out by the Public Works Department this past week which led to blocking of the drain near Mahipalpur. This results in the rainwater not getting drained out and instead pushed into the CPD.
“The work for clearing the water was taken up immediately with eight pumps working at full capacity. A large workforce was also deployed to remove the dangerous sludge from the surface of the road. Senior DIAL officials monitored the operations. The road was made operational after the rain stopped,” the spokesperson added.
Traffic was thrown out of gear as water-logging was reported on Ring Road, Outer Ring Road, Jia Sarai and several other places across the city. Snarls were reported at places like Rajokri, Adhchini, Malaviya Nagar, Moolchand and Chirag Dilli as signals went blank. No prosecution of traffic violators took place as all the traffic police personals were engaged in handling traffic.
Traffic crawled in several parts of the city including Connaught Place, ITO, Ashoka Road, India Gate and Laxmi Nagar. Commuters using public transport also had a harrowing time as bus services were badly hit due to jams. Even auto-drivers refused to take passengers citing jams.
The control rooms of the civic bodies also received a number of complaints regarding water-logging, fallen trees and house collapse due to the rain.
According to the consolidated records across all 12 zones of the three newly constituted Municipal Corporations, incidents of water-logging and fallen trees were reported from Lawrence Road and Azadpur in North Delhi, Narela and Wazirabad in West Delhi, Pahar Ganj in Central Delhi and Saket, Lajpat Nagar, and Defence Colony in South Delhi.
