After flooding, 11 new areas added to ‘critical points’ list

Gurgaon: After the city witnessed one of its worst episodes of flooding last week, the Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA) has redrawn and changed the focus in its new list of ‘critical points’.
Although the list has come down from 35 to 20 points, there are as many as 11 new areas, including Golf Course Road, where waterlogging after Wednesday’s heavy rains took the authorities completely by surprise.
Apart from Golf Course Road, the new points include Shiva Apartments in Sector 28, which was inundated after Wednesday’s deluge, as well as the stretch between Hero Honda Chowk and Umang Bhardwaj Chowk, Sector 31/40 dividing road, Nehru Stadium, Sector 39/46 dividing road and an internal road in Sector 21.
While the authorities were able to manage waterlogging at around 25 points out of the 35-odd places they had identified as ‘critical’ earlier, nine areas were still flooded during last week’s deluge. These included Narsinghpur, Medanta underpass, IFFCO Chowk underpass, Manesar flyover and Jwala Mills junction, among others.
GMDA’s new list includes these nine points along with the 11 new ones.
The chief of the metropolitan authority, VS Kundu, held a meeting on Monday on reviewing the work done by the authorities so far and determining the future course of action with the redrawn list in mind.
Talking about the discussion, which saw participation from various stakeholders, including the government departments concerned and the public representatives, Kundu said that their priority in any such events in the future will be to control flooding in residential areas.
“We cannot allow water to go inside people’s homes and flood society basements. I have told my officers that stopping the water from going into residential areas should be their priority,” Kundu said.
Rainwater had flooded several societies last week, damaging many electrical appliances and furniture.
Industrial and commercial areas will be second on the priority list, followed by the roads and open areas. Asked about how they plan to mitigate flooding in these areas, the GMDA chief said they will look for engineering solutions and “cost will not be an issue”.
GMDA chief engineer Pradeep Kumar said they need to augment the pumping capacity at these 20 points while they look for engineering solutions.
“Golf Course Road was not even operational in 2016 when ‘Gurujam’ happened. At that time, it had taken us 48 hours to take the water out of the underpass. This time, the city witnessed 180mm rain in 30 hours as compared to 55mm in 2016,” Kumar added.
Talking about the capacity of stormwater drains, Kundu said that legs 1, 2 and 3 of the Badshapur drain have been damaged due to the rains, which also contributed to the flooding.
“While the two legs were overflowing, one saw a valve break off due to soil erosion. In order to save these areas from inundation, we need to strengthen the dams at the end of these water channels,” said Kundu.