Every monsoon, there are a few roads and localities that people tend in the city.
Santhome High Road, General Patters Road, Valluvar Kottam High Road, Sardar Patel Road, Vijaya Nagar junction, and parts of Poonamallee High Road, all figure on this list of badly inundated roads.
Ask an expert about the reason for flooding and they attribute it to the city’s flat terrain that lets water to run off slowly. Experts will also say that the city’s stormwater drains cannot handle heavy and incessant rain.
Last month, when it rained for over an hour, Santhome High Road, where there are better drains now, saw even big vehicles floundering in the flash floods. As a result, motorists had a harrowing experience.
300 vulnerable points
After facing major criticism last monsoon, the Greater Chennai Corporation began desilting the stormwater drain network and the canals running across the city to prevent flooding.
After last year’s deluge, 300 locations were identified as vulnerable, a corporation official said. The vulnerable pockets in the southern suburbs include a portion of Grand Southern Trunk Road, where the flood fury led to the shifting of patients from a government hospital in Chromepet.
“With Metrowater delaying the laying of pipelines, water-logging after brief spells of rain cannot be avoided,” says Sankaran V. of Tiruneermalai Main Road. The situation on Medavakkam Main Road at Ullagaram with no stormwater drain facililty is similar.
In addition to completing the cleaning of the stormwater drain network for more than 1,000 km, measures have been taken to identify missing links in 52 locations, which include R.K. Nagar, Habibullah Road in T. Nagar and Purasawalkam High Road. Almost 90 per cent of the work to link missing portions has been completed. Similarly, work on 36 large drains, which are being linked to canals and rivers, was under progress at locations such as TVS Canal at Villivakkam, Flowers Road at Kilpauk and Sardar Patel Road, near the Raj Bhavan, officials said.
With only the old areas such as Triplicane, George Town, Egmore, and Santhome situated on high ground, other parts of the city gets innundated every year during the monsoon.
“After 1991, major civic development sprung up on the semi-natural wetlands which led to closing some waterbodies. As a result, the Adyar river’s flood plains eventually vanished. More recently, development has forayed till the edge of the waterbodies and also on wetlands. Instead of being defined by ecological or hydrological factors, these waterbodies are looked upon based on their revenue records,” said Jayshree Vencatesan of Care Earth Trust.
Need for long-term plan
“What is needed is a long-term plan. We need an integrated urban plan that takes into consideration all aspects such as the geography, ecology, hydrology and meteorology,” Ms. Vencatesan added. Municipal Administration Secretary K. Phanindra Reddy conducted a review meeting on Wednesday on monsoon preparedness. To face this monsoon, Rs. 18 crore had been spent on desilting of 1,229 km of stormwater drains.
As many as 33 new drains and 52 connecting links was taken up at Rs. 91 crore, an official release said. It added that 42 rescue teams, 103 boats and 156 relief camps have been kept on standby. Efforts were on to control mosquito breeding.
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(Reporting by K. Lakshmi, Deepa H. Ramakrishnan, R. Srikanth and T. Madhavan)
