Water enters homes after heavy downpour

Bengaluru: After Bengaluru received a heavy downpour accompanied by thunder and lightning on Tuesday, the rainwater entered many houses in low lying areas. The incident is not new to a few residents as this gets repeated every time there's a heavy rain, causing damage to their hard-earned household property like furniture, TV sets and such other electronic gadgets.

Speaking to The Hans India, Meenakshi Shanmugam, a resident of Rhenius street, Richmond Town, says that this isn't the first time her house has been flooded. "My entire ground floor was flooded with at least 10 inches of water. I've renovated the house recently but when this incident took place earlier, I had to change the furniture. One can't keep spending money to change the furniture again and again. The fridge, other electrical devices, CCTVs would get damaged. We never faced this issue earlier. However, after the SmartCity work started, this is the sixth time that the house was flooded with overflowing drain water. Although officials visited the area to look into the situation and used floor gratings to drain out the rainwater, it didn't seem to work. When the road is flooded and the drains are clogged, they just flow back," she adds.

"A water pump was used to drain the flood water effectively. We had also used floor gratings for the same since the problem had occurred in the past. Rainfall of almost 114 mm was recorded in the city on Tuesday (17th May). Since the house is at a low-lying area and next to the Rajakaluve (stormwater drain), the water has to be diverted and floor gratings must be used near the Rajakaluve," says Chandrashekhar, Assistant Executive Engineer, BBMP.

Waterlogging was reported in other localities including Nagarbhavi, Hoskerehalli, Girinagar, BTM Layout, Bommanahalli and Jaynagar. The control room also received calls regarding the trees falling around the city. Luckily, there were no casualties reported in any of the areas. Power outages for over two to three hours were also reported in some areas.

IMD (Indian Meteorological Department) had issued an orange alert for Bengaluru on Monday, as they had anticipated heavy to very heavy and extremely heavy rainfall across the city. Heavy thundershowers can be expected in the city for another day according to the report.