Rain triggers flooding, road cave-in

Gurgaon: Heavy rains accompanied by gusty winds over the weekend brought the much-needed relief from the sultry heat, but at the same time exposed the city’s perennial problems — inundated stretches and power pangs. The showers washed away the promises made by the authorities on having had spent crores on monsoon preparedness — from setting up ‘state-of-the-art’ control rooms to deploying high-power pumps at vulnerable spots.
In fact, on Sunday, residents woke up to inundated streets, blackouts due to night-long outages, and roads and drains damaged in several areas. One of the worst-hit was a key junction, IFFCO Chowk. A big gaping hole developed on the service lane under the Delhi-Jaipur flyover. Cops rushed to the spot to seal the area with barricades and signage warnings to avoid any casualty. People, who stopped to overlook the grave situation, mocked the civic bodies “for sheer incompetency to run a millennium city”.
“The authorities are playing a joke on all of us. They have no concrete plan to avoid the perennial plan to avoid waterlogging because this way it’s much more profitable for them. Raise funds of hundreds of cores every year to fix waterlogging and then watch it go down the drain with the first spell of showers,” said Bhawani Shankar Tripathy, a Sector 23A resident.
Similarly, at Sector 46 red light, the carriageway caved in, forcing cops to seal the area and divert the traffic. As per GMDA officials, the damage was due to the leakage from the underground sewage pipeline. “The leakage had already weakened the road structure and the waterlogging added to it. When vehicles, especially heavy ones, passed over it the road suffered damages. We have sealed the area and have filled the hole temporarily,” said an official.
As the civic bodies failed to live up to their commitments, once again cops saved the day. Across the city, policemen with half their bodies submerged in water braved the testing conditions to ensure that failures of the civic authorities to contain waterlogging doesn’t leave people high and dry. From issuing real-time alerts to citizens and civic bodies to avoiding casualties due to structural damages that several roads suffered, the quick response of the Gurgaon police was the only saving grace.
The monsoon rains also damaged the power infrastructure, leading to hours-long outages across the city. In areas like Sushant Lok, Palam Vihar, Jharsa and Sector-39, residents grappled with prolonged outages. Power supply was, however, restored in a few areas within a few hours.
The DHBVN, once again, had their standard reply ready as their explanation. The officials argued that the “already-feeble” power infrastructure across the city couldn’t handle torrential rains and heavy winds. “At several places, poles suffered damages, trees fell on 11 KV feeder lines, HT cables sustained damages, among others. Our officials were quick to report to the sight and in fact worked all night to fix the damages even when it was raining,” said a DHBVN official.