The monsoon rains bring floods to many parts of India every year, usually from June to September. The annual rains are needed, however, the intensity of the torrential rains and droughts have become much more frequent.
Tamil Nadu state was hit particularly hard with the monsoon rains this year. Last month, Chennai, a city of 4.5 million people, had the wettest November in over a century. On December 1, 490 mm (19.3 inches) of rainfall in one 24-hour period was the highest in 100 years, reports the BBC.
As of Friday, Reuters is reporting there are still large parts of the city under as much as eight feet of water, even though the rains have eased off. The commercial airport in Chennai is expected to be partially open on Saturday, after being closed for three days. This should allow workers and relief supplies to come into the stricken city.
Flooding kills hundreds of people
According to a Digital Journal story earlier on Friday, at least 300 people have lost their lives in the flooding since November 9. Overnight, 18 hospital patients in an intensive care ward at a private hospital died after flooding created a power outage late Thursday. Local media reports the ventilators stopped when the power went out.
Tamil Nadu health secretary J Radhakrishnan confirmed the deaths at the Madras Institute of Orthopaedics and Traumatology (MIOT), but did not comment on the cause. The hospital had been flooded since Tuesday, and hospital officials sent out an SOS, saying they were running out of food and water.
Many residents of the city have spent the past several days living on rooftops, awaiting rescue. But despite the efforts of civilian and military rescue teams, many areas of the city have yet to be reached. To add to the confusion, some residents are very angry after hearing reports that authorities had released water from overflowing lakes without much notice.
A “disconnect from nature”
A “Green Thumbs Up” article in Digital Journal on November 14, talked about how we have chosen to manipulate our environment when building cities to suit our needs, instead of working with nature.
This “disconnect” is being seen today in Chennai, India. Chennai-based writer and social activist, Nityanand Jayaraman, writing for the BBC says,”The floods are a wake-up call for India’s teeming cities that were built with the expectation that the environment would adjust itself to accommodate the need for the city to grow.”
Nityanand describes the total lack of concern for nature in Chennai, where city planners, architects, administrators and average citizens failed to understand the true power of natural events that take place. And in Chennai, there were no plans or any regard for water flow, and this eventually doomed the city to the devastation we are seeing today.
Illegal building that has taken place over the past two decades has added to the crisis we are now witnessing. Water courses, flood drains and the topography of the land are not even part of the equation when contractors are in a hurry to get a building or complex finished. The irreversible damage done to natural waters courses is now being seen, not just in Chennai, but other cities as well.
The Indian Express newspaper reports, “What may have been a tank, lake, canal or river 20 years ago is today the site of multi-story residential and industrial structures.”
The heavy rains forced city administrators to release water from Chembarambakkam reservoir into the Adyar river, which is rather shallow. Additionally, waters were released from the Poondi and Puzhal reservoirs. This caused a rise in water levels in the Cooum river that flows through the city. Of course, the floods that resulted from this untimely release of water is what is now being seen.
India’s top meteorologist is saying the heavy rains and flooding can be linked to climate change, and possibly this may be true. But until we realize that we can’t change our environment to suit our needs, it will only get worse. It’s time that governments look at ways to accommodate our changing climate, and that includes taking action on fixing what we have, making it more resilient to natural events.
