Heavy October rain chokes Monday traffic in the Capital

The mismanagement by civic and government agencies was compounded with heavier than usual traffic on the roads as people returned to work on Monday after a long weekend due to the Dussehra break

Heavy rain on Monday, which made this the wettest October in Delhi since 1960, threw life out of gear in the national capital, leading to widespread waterlogging and traffic snarls with the traffic police advising commuters against taking some key arterial roads that remained jammed through the morning peak hours.

HT Image

The mismanagement by civic and government agencies was compounded with heavier than usual traffic on the roads as people returned to work on Monday after a long weekend due to the Dussehra break.

Delhi continued its trend of breaking weather records for the 15th month in a row, as heavy rain in the National Capital Region surpassed the figure for 24-hour data in October from 1956.

This year, 94.6mm of rainfall has already been recorded in the city in October. According to data shared by the India Meteorological Department, the months of October in 1910 recorded 185.9mm rainfall, 238.2mm rainfall in 1954, 236.2mm rainfall in 1956, and 93.4mm rainfall in 1960. In 2004, 89mm rainfall was recorded in all of October.

As rush hour began, arterial stretches were jammed as waist-deep waters disabled several vehicles. Crucial spots in and around Minto Road, ITO, Dhaula Kuan and Moolchand were among those badly hit, as were high-profile Lutyens enclaves such as Chanakyapuri, Shanti Path and Connaught Place.

Major roads were intermittently closed for movement after overnight rainfall, which continued for most of Monday. While the Pul Prahladpur underpass at the Mehrauli-Badarpur Road was barricaded for traffic again as it was flooded, long traffic jams were reported in areas including Lajpat Nagar, Ashram intersection, Moti Bagh, Sri Aurobindo Marg, Hauz Khas, Dwarka Link Road and Noida Link Road.

Experts said that Delhi needs to have a traffic management plan to avert a traffic mess every time there is heavy rain. “We need a plan on two levels; one is that we need to fix our drainage systems to accommodate the current population load of the city and the second is to have a dedicated traffic management plan for rainy days. For every arterial stretch that routinely gets choked because of water logging, agencies need to come up with multiple alternative routes where traffic can be diverted. This information can be communicated to commuters via the variable messaging sign boards or through traffic police’s social media handles,” said professor Sewa Ram from the School of Planning and Architecture.

An official said that the worst affected stretch was the Ring Road, where traffic crawled through for several hours at a stretch. Under-construction projects, coupled with torrential rainfall and waterlogging led to commuters getting delayed by several hours, the official said.

“We had deployed maximum staff on the roads to direct traffic but there is only so much we can do during such intense and widespread rainfall. The roads are drowned in rainwater, two-wheeler riders also tend to seek refuge below flyovers, which also tends to block a portion of the road and visibility is also an issue because of which traffic movement slows down,” a senior traffic police official said, asking not to be named.

Every month since August 2020, Delhi has broken at least one weather record, IMD data shows. Met officials and scientists said that while these extreme weather recordings are the immediate result of temporary atmospheric events over (and in and around) the national capital, the larger role of the climate crisis in the overall shifting of weather patterns is evident.

Mahesh Palawat, vice-president (meteorology and climate change) at Skymet Weather Services, a private weather forecasting agency, said that a low-pressure area formed over the Bay of Bengal extended its impact till southwest Uttar Pradesh.

“Because of this, moderate easterly winds started blowing over the northern plains, up to Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. A deep trough was also extending from Punjab to Arabian Sea across Rajasthan and Gujarat, which also brought moisture into the region. The convergence of these two humid winds, along with a western disturbance over north Pakistan combined to form such a weather condition that led to such intense and widespread rain in the entire northwest region,” Palawat said.

The city has around 150 pain points that get flooded every time it rains. On Monday, traffic officials placed diversion at several of these spots as waterlogging made them impossible to cross.

Officials of the Delhi government declined a comment.

East Delhi mayor Shyam Sunder Aggarwal said that the reason behind waterlogging is the bigger drains managed by PWD and flood control department not being cleared. “Corporation’s smaller drains have outfall in the bigger drains. When the larger drains are not cleared the water outflow can not be managed. Majority of waterlogging has been seen on roads bigger than 60ft,” he said.