Civic body blames overloaded drains for recent flooding

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has attributed flooding in the 10 chronic flooding spots after Sunday evening’s rainfall to rainfall exceeding the quantity of water the city’s drains can carry per hour. It has also declared that there is no solution to the flooding, if the city faces rainfall exceeding 25 mm per hour.

After the rainfall received by the city on Sunday evening, water logging was reported in up to 10 spots in the city, including areas of Dadar, Hindmata, Prabhadevi, and Matunga. Civic officials have attributed this to high amounts of rainfall in these areas, nearing 50 mm within half an hour. Deputy municipal commissioner Sudhir Naik said, “We encountered some technical problems during this time and we are in the process of checking what the remedy is. However, drainage capacity cannot be changed overnight. The rainfall also happened during the high-tide hours in the evening so some water-logging was inevitable.”

These spots witnessed water-logging even though the Britannia pumping station has been commissioned this monsoon exclusively for areas of Dadar and Hindmata. Mr Naik confirmed that all pumping stations were functional at the time of the rain. However, the pumping station is useful only after the water-logging reaches a particular level. After this time, the pumps at Britannia pumping station functioned, due to which Hindmata was moderately flooded only for 25 minutes, Mr Naik said.

Laxman Vhatkar, director of services and engineering, who is in charge of Mumbai’s storm water drains, said, “The drainage’s carrying capacity in the city is of 25 mm per hour. These drains are very old and have been there since the time of the British period. We cannot increase their water-carrying capacity now. Even though we have increased the drainage capacity in the suburbs to 50 mm per hour.”