Bone dry neighbourhood recounts deluge this time last year

Chennai: This day last year was the morning after the city recorded its highest rainfall (23.5 cm) on a single day and woke up to mass rescue. The grim image of an 80-year-old woman lying flat on a boat waiting for an ambulance epitomised the trauma Chennaiites went through on the wettest November they had seen. The

Velachery

Main Road where the boat was berthed was virtually a river with rescuers, police and her anxious son desperate to get help standing around. In constast, Wednesday was hot,

dry

and sunny with vehicular traffic as usual on this busy arterial road. Not many here rue the delay in the monsoon this year.

“I remember there were boats all around me and I saw this old lady from afar and I was frightened not knowing what was happening to us,” says an elderly woman Rajalakshmi, walking under the scorching sun. Last year on this day she was fleeing her home on a boat along with her family.

Vehicles were restricted to one side of the median as boats plied on the other side. Across the city, dozens of lives were lost and the four main reservoirs were brimming. South Chennai shuddered as

water

from the Chembarambakkam lake in Kancheepuram was let out into Adyar river, flooding Saidapet, Porur, Nandambakkam and Kotturpuram. More than 11,000 people were evacuated from low lying areas by corporation and

disaster management

forces while helicopters hovered over skies airlifting people and dropping food packets.

While temperatures dipped to a minimum of 23.3 degrees last November, Wednesday morning recorded 32 degrees. Residents, commuters and workers didn’t mind the heat at all. Every time the sky turns gloomy, the fear of another

flood

runs deep. A home nurse, Alagamai watches the news every day so that she can to book her tickets to Trichy as soon as the MET announces the monsoon’s arrival. “Last year, I kept praying every second,” she says. “The water had entered the ground floor and we were on the floor above.” Most households changed their doors, water pumps and replaced their gadgets. The neighbourhood has been talking about raising their houses to protect themselves against another possible flood.

For corporate security staff member V Raghavan, wading through water last year was an encore of the 1985 floods when MG Ramachandran was chief minister. “I was 24-years-old and living in Saidapet then,” he said. “MGR had distributed bags of rice which we took back home in a bullock cart. Last year, we had to leave our home and stay on the Velachery railway platform for a week and only volunteers and NGOs helped us.”

There is a lot of anger on the streets against the government. In the assembly election in May, Velachery, like most of Chennai, voted against the incumbent AIADMK and the constituency elected DMK’s Vagai Chandrasekhar as their MLA. But the problem of open drains and encroachments continue. “I have been commuting from Adambakkam to Velachery every day to pick up my daughter from her LKG,” says Vasanthi Chandrasekhar. “She is in college now, but I have seen no effort or change all these years. We are safe now because it is sunny. It will be a horror when it rains.”