Rain Havoc Once Again

Bengaluru has once again been pummeled by heavy rains on night intervening Wednesday and Thursday. Several city areas that were struck with the thunderstorm, received rains varying between five and seven centimetres.

Though the full scale of damage the rains have cause are yet to emerge, videos viral on the social media platforms show several underpasses getting deluged, citizens struggling to save their vehicles from being washed away and Diwali shoppers caught amidst the rain. Visuals of a part of the retaining wall of the Metro tunnel in Seshadripuram caving in—damaging several cars and other automobiles—have found their way into the news headlines.

To add to the worries of the citizens, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has predicted more rains during the next three days. Even as the memories of the deluge of the September 5 and its devastating aftermath are still raw, there are apprehensions about rains staging an encore.

While the BBMP brought in bulldozers to clear the flow path of the rainwater immediately after the September showers, later reports have showed that they were mere eyewash as they tackled only the small encroachers and the bigger ones remained untouched. The demolitions came in the wake of chief minister Basavaraj Bommai pledging to pull out all stops to get the state capital back on its feet following widespread flooding due to unprecedented rainfall in early September.

The city has received over 170 centimetres of rainfall this year against the annual average of 92 cms. The city’s fragile infrastructure incapable of taking tackling such volumes of rainwater has received a rare battering, the kind of which had not been witnessed so far.

Not much has been heard about the promise to restore over 800 kilometres of storm water drains (rajakaluves) after some initial activity and it is business as usual for the administration. The city fathers need to understand as to why certain areas such as Varathur, Electronic City, Yemalur and Bellandur in Mahadevapura get flooded repeatedly.

The city stands on a ridge of the Deccan Plateau with no water body or sea skirting it. The rainwater that falls across and around the city flows from three major valleys to Varathur lake in the city’s southern part. The city’s topography is such that Varathur is 90 metres below the highest point i.e., High Grounds— from 935 metres to 845 metres. This has been the flow pattern on rainwater for centuries.

The city has risen over the ridge often ignoring the essential historic pathways of rainwater thereby allowing it to wash away or deluge all that interrupts its course. Conservationist Arun Pai of Bangalore Walks has recently explained the phenomenon through a video series. “Water has a memory and it follows the same path.

There is no mystery to it”, he has said. It is time, the city planners take a deeper look at the topography of the city afresh stop tampering with the natural course of rainwater in order to gratify the appetite of the builders and developers’ lobby. It is a tragedy that the lesson learnt only a month ago were forgotten so soon.