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Title: Rain and flooding in Mumbai
Category: Other
Blog Entry: Rain and flooding in mumbai: This write up is on request. Rain in Mumbai occaisionaly when there is high tide causes flooding. There is then tremendous loss of shops, godowns, and other material as well as transport system gets halted causing manpower loss. Well who is to blame? Lets see infrastructure first. The drainage system is double in Mumbai one for sewerage, second for storm water. In city areas this was constructed at british time some 50 to 100 years back. It can drain storm water of only 2 inches rain per hour for max two hours. You can blame british engineers for that. After independence our engineers learned this and tried to widen the two drains one at sewree and another at worli and tried to pump out rain water from there.Another pumping station is at colaba. It works when pumps work full power. But generally Mumbai rain is associated with disrrupton of electricity and loss becomes inevitable. Second thing is chocking of drains by plastic and tyres and anything you name it. so all Mumbai city part upto mahim which is lower than sea level floods. Suburbs of Mumbai were developed after 1961. Municiple corporation appointed a british company as consultant, they recommended open drains for suburbs. It was a wrong suggestion because people throw garbage in gutters and they get chocked. Again blame british. Now they are closing drains but damadge is done. Municipality spends crores to clean drain before rainy season. British campany also suggested construction of pumping stations but these pumps never work due to technical reasons. In high tide sea water gets surged back into the drains. Same as new Orleans where pumps did not work well. It seems routine pumping is no answer to flooding. We need special technology( we may call dutch who pump sea water out). In short Mumbai is below sea level and you have to pump flood water out. It wont flow out naturally.