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Chennai deluge: Stories of hardship come flooding back
Rain- battered scenes are not unfamiliar to Chennai, particularly after the devastation of the 2015 floods that killed 400 people
Chennai: For five days, M Mahendran’s life has been hell.
The 46-year-old entrepreneur and father of two has not seen the outside of his independent home in Madipakkam, one of Chennai’s worst-inundated localities, since torrential showers began on Sunday.
On Monday morning, he let out a shriek when he spotted a snake that lay still on the window of the room where his seven-year old son was attending online classes in – the reptile having floated in on the standing water gathering outside on the road.
Three days later, the Mahendran family is marooned in one room of their home, the water level only rising. “There is four feet of water outside our home, and it has entered the living room. I only pray it doesn’t enter the one room we are now in,” said Mahendran over the phone.
These rain- battered scenes are not unfamiliar to Chennai, particularly after the devastation of the 2015 floods that killed 400 people, and thus Mahendran has been preparing. “I have the habit of stocking up because I have two sons who are five and seven, and I didn’t want to take a chance. So we have been able to manage for now but I don’t know how many days we will have to remain like this.”
Across Chennai on Thursday, Mahendran’s plight was echoed by thousands of citizens. Families either trapped inside their homes because the streets outside are waterlogged, or on higher floors or rooftops because the water entered their homes, carrying only their identity cards and a few spare clothes. Trapped inside, across a metropolitan city where the civic infrastructure is collapsing under pressure, many were even seen using ropes to lower buckets from higher floors to the ground, where volunteers in boats passed on essentials like milk, bread packets, cooked food and water cans.
On the streets of the metropolis, inflated rescue boats were as visible as wheeled vehicles, deployed across the city in Madhavaram, Madippakkam, Velachery, T Nagar, Peravallur, Perambur and Pattalam. With many just stranded where they were, unable to step out, only 40 of 160 government shelters set up in the city were occupied on Thursday.
In areas like Pattalam in central Chennai, the continued rainfall only added to the sheets of water stagnating for the past four days. This, locals said, had affected not only homes but businesses too. B Rama, who runs a grocery shop said, “We shut shop on Sunday and we haven’t been able to go back. All our rice stock has submerged.” Rama said that there had also been no electricity for the past four days, and therefore for any supplies, people were having to step out, braving the weather. “Women here are walking through chest-deep water,” said B Rama who has a rice shop in Pattalam.
Power supply to more than 60,000 houses across the city were suspended as a safety measure in Chennai, electricity minister Senthil Balaji told reporters on Thursday. But this also affected water supply in tanks. Ram Mohan, a resident of Madhavaram in north Chennai, where almost every road is submerged, said, “We have been stuck at home since Sunday and now they have cut off power too. The rain water has mixed with sewage and garbage. So not only are we immobile until the waters recede but we don’t know what infections this would lead to,” he said.
And yet, even as parts of Chennai struggled to deal with the crisis, some tried to keep the cheer, albeit with a little government help, and when that wasn’t possible, helped each other. With early November being wedding season, vernacular television news showed visuals of the fire department using a boat to take back a wedding couple and their guests from a submerged marriage hall to their home in T Nagar.
In Perambur, families living in a high-rise apartment got together to cook meals for their less fortunate neighbours. “Most of them are slums so they have moved to government shelters,” said a resident Narendra Jain. “We have all stocked up when the rains subsided on Monday and Tuesday and we are safe indoors. So starting today we decided to cook for about poor 500 families who live next to us and are really struggling in four feet deep water.”
In Velachery, the lessons from 2015 brought a strange sight on Thursday, with rows of vehicles parked atop a flyover. Velachery, residents said, was low lying, and had seen much damage to life and property six years ago. “The 2015 floods are so fresh in everyone’s minds that nobody wants to take a risk. Most of the cars on the flyover will have a registration starting with the same series because that was the series that came out after the 2015 floods when many of these people lost their cars,” said local resident E Sunalini.
Sunalini herself was marooned back in 2015 in Jafferkhanpet where she recalled water was 12-feet high. People then were swimming in these localities to warn their neighbours or pass any information. The following year Sunalini moved to Velachery but has been lucky thus far -- her street has not flooded. “The storm water drains built here recently are making a lot of difference but the surrounding areas are still heavily water logged.”
Back in Madipakkam, four kilometers away from Velachery, Mahendran has been desperately trying to find a way out. Outside his window, where the snake once was, civic body workers have been using motor pumps to drain the water. “But even when they do, the water returns in half an hour,” said Mahendran. For now, he is waiting, and praying that the worst is over.
