Amid flood, ST staff sat atop bus 9 hours with Rs 9 lakh

MUMBAI: When water level started rising in Chiplun in Ratnagiri district last Thursday, the manager of the MSRTC bus depot, who managed to reach his office around 4.30am braving the floods, faced an arduous task: to prevent Rs 9 lakh daily revenue kept there from getting destroyed.
With the whole area flooded, Ranjeet RajeShirke realised that only the roof of one of the submerged buses was a safe bet. He and six of his team members climbed atop a bus around 5.30am and stayed there for nine hours holding on to a bag containing the cash before NDRF rescued them.
“It was scary. There were moments when the water level was so high that the bus began to shake and we feared we could be thrown off any moment. But we stood firm,” RajeShirke said. The government now plans to felicitate them, reports Somit Sen.
As he recalled the horror last Thursday, he said, “It was around 4.30am last Thursday that I reached the depot amid heavy rains and saw the entire depot was flooded and water level was rising. The release of dam water made the situation worse and although rains had stopped for a while, the water kept flowing into the depot and the buses were submerged.”
“There was no other place I could think of as there were chances of the cash being destroyed in flood water. It was then that I decided to go on the roof of a bus,” he said.