Re: Chennai floods
Posted: 07 Dec 2015 22:30
Dhanya Rajendran @dhanyarajendran 4h4 hours ago
We need help. Badly need volunteers to go to Sree Rama Marriage Hall, behind Palmgrove hotel. To pack food. Urgent. #ChennaiRainsHelp
Consortium of Indian Defence Websites
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Dhanya Rajendran @dhanyarajendran 4h4 hours ago
We need help. Badly need volunteers to go to Sree Rama Marriage Hall, behind Palmgrove hotel. To pack food. Urgent. #ChennaiRainsHelp
Apparently there have been some language communication issues, which makes working with the locals a bit hard, which was acknowledged by the gent in charge of NDRF, one Maj. Gen. Anurag.Singha wrote:actually I was wondering if the ndrf people reached there by boat, why they did not take her by boat to hospital or a proper helipad.
That's the new hip area in Chennai.. Velachery Main Road at Velachery.Singha wrote:could this be the main road in adyar?
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/as ... er-169.jpg
A close friend living in the Silicon Valley was in panic because his wife and infant daughter were stranded in Chennai and were inaccessible. Their house was in a low-lying area. He went on the crowdsourcing site, picked up the number of a random person (a complete stranger) who he thought lived in the same area as his wife did, and called him. It was 1 a.m. in India.
The stranger not only responded to the call but immediately offered to search for my friend’s wife and daughter and report back on their safety. He waded through chest-deep water, which was contaminated because sewer lines had burst open, for an hour to locate the woman and the infant. They were safe but were without milk and other necessities. He then again waded through sewage water located a pharmacy, got some dried milk powder and water bottles, returned and gave it to them. He had been soaking in sewage water for nearly four hours by then. He then called my friend to report on their safety.
....
Hindu traditions have always taught that we are obligated to everyone else in this world. They called this obligation ṛṇa. An expression of charity, called dāna, is how ṛṇa is fulfilled. I can say with pride that Indians, regardless of how well-read or articulate they are, have internalized these great ideals. That is what inspires them to act spontaneously and selflessly when Mother Nature overwhelms our ephemeral existence.
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Army officials remarked that Chennai is the only place where they saw more volunteers than victims!
Velachery. This area has been flood prone for ages. But hey, who cares.Singha wrote:could this be the main road in adyar?
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/as ... er-169.jpg
And you can see half the road being encroached on the left side while drains laying work seems proceeding on the right side (or is it also encroachment?).Prasad wrote:Velachery.Singha wrote:could this be the main road in adyar?
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/as ... er-169.jpg
When K.P.K. Nagar in Perungudi was inundated, residents were at their wit’s end. The inundation was sudden. On Tuesday night, while the families were fast asleep, water levels had risen. On Wednesday morning, many woke up with flood waters gently washing over them.
Many of the residents did not know where to turn for help.
And so, they went about organising their own rescue. They took whatever junk material they could lay hands on – anything that would enable them to float to safety – and created their own rescue boats.
They stuffed big polythene bags with discarded foam and empty plastic bottles and created their own floats. For people to sit on them, they appropriately placed planks underneath the polythene bags.
It seemed to be a community effort with everyone pitching in with materials and time. After all, all of them wanted to get out of the locality which was hopelessly submerged.
They started making the floats in the early hours of the day and soon had 25 of them, with which 70 percent of the locality were rescued. The sight of little children and senior citizens sitting on the floats as they were being pulled through the waters to safer ground attracted a sizeable crowd.
Residents carried their pets and livestock out the locality. The local Thoraipakkam police offered their help in what was largely a community effort.
For Wing Commander C.S. Simon and Squadron Leader S. Venkataramanan of the Air Force, December 3 was yet another busy day flying sorties on Cheetah helicopter for rescue and airdropping relief material till Monday when they realised that a video of their rescue of a pregnant woman, who eventually delivered twins, went viral on the social media, earning them praises for a timely rescue.
Recalling the challenging task, the pilots said they hovered the helicopter, placed one of the skids on top of a water tank on a building while rescuing the pregnant woman, who was already in labour pains.
“We went there after getting instructions from our operations room. The challenge was that once we approached the spot in Ramapuram, there were over a thousand people on the terraces of many buildings and we could not spot her. NDRF personnel used a chair and helped her get on the chopper,” says Squadron Leader Venkataramanan, the co-pilot of the helicopter.
Wing Commander C.S. Simon recalls the incident as “satisfying task” as it was a very important moment for the expectant mother. “We realised she could not walk and hence there was no way the waist strap could be fastened around her. It would have lead to miscarriage. So we decided to low-hover the aircraft.”
Corporal Arun Singh and Corporal Rahul Kumar helped the pregnant woman get on the helicopter which helped her land in Tambaram Air Force Station. But her journey with the Air Force was not over yet.
Roads cut off
“She had to be rushed to Sri Ramachandra Hospital in Porur, but the roads were cut off. So we flew her to the hospital and landed on a basketball ground on the campus. It was actually a surprise for the hospital authorities to see a patient arrive by a helicopter,” recalls Mr. Venkataramanan.
The pilots are happy to know that the woman was delivered of twins – both girls on Thursday. “Though it was an everyday incident to us, we are happy for the mother and the babies,” he said.
The woman who was rescued on the day of her Expected Date of Delivery (EDD) was sent a gift by Air Chief Marshal Arup Raha on behalf of the Air Force, which was hand-delivered by the same pilots at the hospital on Monday.
At a time when the flood affected people of Tamil Nadu are gratefully acknowledging the extraordinary relief work undertaken by volunteers from different parts of the country, a few cases of unruly elements allegedly belonging to the ruling AIADMK confronting the volunteers have come as a dampener. Some of these instances have been captured on camera and have gone viral on social media drawing widespread condemnation from civil society.
In one incident broadcast on Tamil television channels, including one channel which did not have any political affiliation, an AIADMK functionary and his accomplices, were seen intimidating volunteers from Bengaluru who were preparing food in Anna Nagar for distribution to the affected people.
The functionary, identified as Ko Tamilselvam, demanded 2,000 packets of food from the volunteers, which he wanted to distribute to the local people. The volunteer refused to give in to the demand, which evoked angry reactions from Tamilselvam and his accomplices.
The partymen dispersed only to return later on learning that the volunteers were distributing the food packets in the locality without inviting him. Tamilselvam is seen in the video mouthing expletives and moving menacingly towards the volunteers, who were visibly shaken by the political insensitivity of the men.
In another video, circulated on social media, a bearded volunteer was accosted by a couple of men, one of whom claimed to be the husband of a councillor and demanded 2,000 food packets. When the volunteer demanded that they give their request it in writing and captured the scene on video, the two men beat a hasty retreat.
Party's response
“Media is being constantly misled. We have been guiding and helping the volunteers. How do we know that the claims made in the video are true? If it is proven true, the party high command will take severe action. The opposition parties are taking advantage of a crisis to take advantage politically,” a party leader contended.
It's Velachery all right. The road heading off from Vijayanagar junction towards the MRTS station and Tambaram.SSridhar wrote:And you can see half the road being encroached on the left side while drains laying work seems proceeding on the right side (or is it also encroachment?).
SaiK could you please stop passing unnecessary critical comments about photos of people in distress? It is quite obvious that two people are wading with the babies. If they carried the babies and they had a misstep they would fall in the water. Without the extra weight of the babies they can walk carefully and even a stumble will not necessarily upset the raft. Have you considered that both children may be of one mother who could not possibly have carried both together and had to save them/get them to a place where food and water was available. And yes that "plasticky float" is called a raft. It seems to be made of planks, with plastic to prevent the children from getting wet. Imagine how terrified they might be even without sitting with wet bottoms on a raft in an emergency.SaiK wrote:^^^those babies on top of the plasticky float is a bad idea. what are these women thinking? one flip at a wrong spot is an end game for them. people take life simple and given that no big risk can happen at a time it is the most demanding to be safe, is simply horrible.
The flood that ravaged Chennai last week was not a natural disaster, but one caused by the state bureaucracy's failure to regulate release of water from Chembarambakkam reservoir (lake) in the outskirts of the city.
Those privy to developments in the state secretariat during the last week of November say that in the wake of international weather forecast agencies predicting 500mm of rain for Chennai on December 1 and 2, public works department (PWD) officials had advised the PWD secretary and other senior bureaucrats on November 26 to bring down the water level in the reservoir from 22ft to below 18ft so the lake could absorb heavy inflow four days later. {Chembarambakkam was having 3140 Mcft of water against total capacity of 3645 Mcft on 26th November and the inflow was 2165 cusecs while outflow was slightly above at 2500 cusecs}There was not much rain between November 26 and 29 and Adyar river, too, which originates from this lake, had very little water.
The proposal to release lake water was caught in bureaucratic red tape. Sources said the PWD secretary waited for chief secretary's nod to open the sluice gates — and whose nod the chief secretary was waiting for still remains a mystery. In effect, the disaster caused in Punjab by heavy release of water from the Bhakra Nangal dam two years ago was repeated in Chennai.
Orders to open the Chembarambakkam sluice gates — rather flood gates — were not received till the city received was pounded with rain and the reservoir started overflowing. "The state administration maintained that the release from the reservoir into Adyar river was only 33,500 cusecs (cubic feet per second; 1 cubic ft is 28.3 litres of water), which is the maximum capacity of the gates, from December 1 night onwards. But the actual release was more than double that, and nobody has any idea how much it was because water was overflowing from Chembarambakkam after the reservoir reached its full capacity of 24 feet. The problem was compounded as Athannur lake breached, releasing about 5,000 cusecs into the Adyar," said a highly placed source in PWD.
In effect, Adyar was carrying more than one lakh cusecs of water on December 2 and 3, said a senior IAS official, who was coordinating rescue operations. "The city has paid the price for having a bunch of bureaucrats who don't have the guts to act on their own. We were lucky that the reservoir, despite overflowing, did not breach," he said.
"Flooding of Chennai and suburbs could have been averted by better management of water release," said Madras Institute of Development Studies professor S Janakarajan. The administration should not have viewed Chembarambakkam in isolation. The lake and Adyar river are connected to about 200 tanks, he said. Even if 33,500 cusecs had been released from Chembarambakkam, by the time the water reached Saidapet, it would have swelled to 60,000 cusecs because of additional flow from other water bodies enroute. The administration failed to gauge this and hapless people paid the price for it, he explained.
Janakarajan said the government should view all water bodies, roughly 3,600 of them, in Chennai, Kancheepuram and Thiruvallur districts as one watershed as they are hydrologically connected to one another. "If the government cleans up all those water bodies, they can hold about 30 tmcft (thousand million cubic feet) of water. Moreover, it will also prevent flooding in future," he said.
The magnitude of the disaster was more because there was no advisory issued to people living in low-lying areas, warning them that their homes could get flooded. To add to the misery, Chennai city police officers were instructed to keep their cell phones switched off (much before mobile phone towers went down) and carry out all communications only through wireless sets. Hence, people in distress could not seek help by reaching out to officials in their locality.
TOI's repeated efforts to get responses from the chief secretary and PWD secretary went in vain. Some pertinent questions that remain unanswered are: Whose orders were the bureaucrats waiting for to open the reservoir sluices? Will anybody be held responsible for the lapses? And, at least now, will the government put a standard operating procedure in place to keep reservoirs at safe levels? Will a better system be evolved to warn people living on river banks before gates are opened?
The bureaucratic mess at Chennai International Airport over the past decade should have been warning enough that the governance in Chennai is poor.Why should v believe that this won't happen again next month/year/year aphter that onlee?
I am not opposed to Muslims entering temples, humanitarian grounds matter in times of distress without consideration to race, creed, gender, religion ityadi. No two doubts about it. Humans have to help fellow humans. My only takleef was about the rumor of giving rugs for namaz.Prasad wrote: Also, to those who are opposed to muslims inside the temple, many mosques took in people in their areas without conditions. I saw some comments on twitter saying temples have to be cleaned with milk for letting these people inside. I mean WTF man.
mullaperiyar water was released yesterday @ 5 a.m.Bade wrote: Now when the Periyar reservoir breaks out and flows down hill, that is something to watch for if a minor low level reservoir overflow can do so much damage in Chennai. At least the metro there will be floating 10 metres above ground in Cochin and there are no tunnels to worry about.
all the baboo(n)s, especially the much vaunted IAS types had simply vanished from the scene, abdicating all responsibility and leaving the battered citizenry to their fate. They seem good only for fair weather "administration" and their sense of entitlement is embedded deeply in their psyche. They will surface now, as the sun starts to come out.SSridhar wrote:Delay in opening sluice gates caused flooding - ToI
The flood that ravaged Chennai last week was not a natural disaster, but one caused by the state bureaucracy's failure to regulate release of water from Chembarambakkam reservoir (lake) in the outskirts of the city.
Those privy to developments in the state secretariat during the last week of November say that in the wake of international weather forecast agencies predicting 500mm of rain for Chennai on December 1 and 2, public works department (PWD) officials had advised the PWD secretary and other senior bureaucrats on November 26 to bring down the water level in the reservoir from 22ft to below 18ft so the lake could absorb heavy inflow four days later. {Chembarambakkam was having 3140 Mcft of water against total capacity of 3645 Mcft on 26th November and the inflow was 2165 cusecs while outflow was slightly above at 2500 cusecs}There was not much rain between November 26 and 29 and Adyar river, too, which originates from this lake, had very little water.
The proposal to release lake water was caught in bureaucratic red tape. Sources said the PWD secretary waited for chief secretary's nod to open the sluice gates — and whose nod the chief secretary was waiting for still remains a mystery. In effect, the disaster caused in Punjab by heavy release of water from the Bhakra Nangal dam two years ago was repeated in Chennai.
Orders to open the Chembarambakkam sluice gates — rather flood gates — were not received till the city received was pounded with rain and the reservoir started overflowing. "The state administration maintained that the release from the reservoir into Adyar river was only 33,500 cusecs (cubic feet per second; 1 cubic ft is 28.3 litres of water), which is the maximum capacity of the gates, from December 1 night onwards. But the actual release was more than double that, and nobody has any idea how much it was because water was overflowing from Chembarambakkam after the reservoir reached its full capacity of 24 feet. The problem was compounded as Athannur lake breached, releasing about 5,000 cusecs into the Adyar," said a highly placed source in PWD.
In effect, Adyar was carrying more than one lakh cusecs of water on December 2 and 3, said a senior IAS official, who was coordinating rescue operations. "The city has paid the price for having a bunch of bureaucrats who don't have the guts to act on their own. We were lucky that the reservoir, despite overflowing, did not breach," he said.
"Flooding of Chennai and suburbs could have been averted by better management of water release," said Madras Institute of Development Studies professor S Janakarajan. The administration should not have viewed Chembarambakkam in isolation. The lake and Adyar river are connected to about 200 tanks, he said. Even if 33,500 cusecs had been released from Chembarambakkam, by the time the water reached Saidapet, it would have swelled to 60,000 cusecs because of additional flow from other water bodies enroute. The administration failed to gauge this and hapless people paid the price for it, he explained.
Janakarajan said the government should view all water bodies, roughly 3,600 of them, in Chennai, Kancheepuram and Thiruvallur districts as one watershed as they are hydrologically connected to one another. "If the government cleans up all those water bodies, they can hold about 30 tmcft (thousand million cubic feet) of water. Moreover, it will also prevent flooding in future," he said.
The magnitude of the disaster was more because there was no advisory issued to people living in low-lying areas, warning them that their homes could get flooded. To add to the misery, Chennai city police officers were instructed to keep their cell phones switched off (much before mobile phone towers went down) and carry out all communications only through wireless sets. Hence, people in distress could not seek help by reaching out to officials in their locality.
TOI's repeated efforts to get responses from the chief secretary and PWD secretary went in vain. Some pertinent questions that remain unanswered are: Whose orders were the bureaucrats waiting for to open the reservoir sluices? Will anybody be held responsible for the lapses? And, at least now, will the government put a standard operating procedure in place to keep reservoirs at safe levels? Will a better system be evolved to warn people living on river banks before gates are opened?
Those are tactical fire fighters who might have done heroic stuff during the deluge. But remember, Strategy always dominates tactical action. The Stratejee Baboons (Chief Baboon and his underlings/acolytes down the chain, to the PWD Baboon) dropped the ball if the Times Of India article is correct.I know of four IAS officers who were very visible during the calamity. Three collectors Gagandeep Singh Bedi in Cuddalore, Ms. Sundaravalli in Chennai, Ms. Gajalakshmi in Kancheepuram and J.Radhakrishnan, Health Secretary TN.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/Locked-at-home-Armyman-wife-died-sending-SOSs/articleshow/50099333.cmsHe survived the times spent in sensitive areas and in firing lines while serving the Indian Army. However, 72-year-old retired Lt.Col. G.Venkatesan had a tragic death along with his wife drowning inside his house after nine hours of struggle. Neighbours who heard them cry for help watched helplessly until their voice ceased to be heard. Venkatesan and his wife Geetha drowned inside their ground floor residence, “Geethalaya” in Defence officers colony in Ekkatuthangal, unable to get out of it.
“It was Tuesday night (December 1). Heavy floods from the overflowing river started engulfing the colony and the water level started rising. Our family including three kids moved to the first floor as the water level was just below the first floor balcony,” J Sasikala, the army officer’s neighbour recalled.
She and other neighbours could hear the cries of the elderly couple from their home, but none of them could help as the water was up to 10 feet high and rescue couldn’t reach in time.
The next day, the cries were not heard and later the neighbours learnt that the couple had died inside their locked house. “It seems they couldn’t locate the door keys in the flood waters. I could hear him shouting over phone to his daughter until the mobile services eventually went off,” Sasikala said.
A day later, rescue personnel recovered their bodies and moved them to the Government Royapettah Hospital. “The bodies were handed over to the couple’s daughter and son-in-law after autopsy,” police said.
Nandambakkam Police Inspector Giri said patrol teams visited the residential areas and called out residents to vacate their houses the day it rained heavily. “The couple chose to remain inside,” he added.
From what relatives later learnt from their daughter, Venkatesan got up on the dining table and then stood on a chair on the dining table shouting for help for several hours before the water levels rose to roof level drowning the couple.
The couple’s last rites were held on Sunday.