Well we all kind of scraped through the rains that hit Chennai.
These are some photos that I took - most are after the Dec 1, 2015 rains, a few taken a couple of days before. Most of these photos are taken in an area considered to have been very heavily affected.
In 2 days, Chennai received one of the heaviest rain seen in the last 100 years. The city got more rain in 2 days than it normally gets in a whole year.
These photos are by no means unique. They are the pictures of one area of Chennai as seen from my eyes.
Things kinda look normal. Calm before the storm?
Around 4PM
A poorly lit park around 7PM before Dec 2nd 2015.
On one of the days when there was heavy rain. It looked so peaceful and nice earlier in the day.
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Main Road on Dec 1st, I think when the water level started rising on the roads. Dry earlier in the day, it was creepy the way water started to come closer and closer to our house. |
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| The road was cordoned off. Traffic was stopped by police. One couldn't use the bridge to go from one side of Adyar river to another. It was like back in the 1980's I am told - when the bridge didn't exist. |
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| Water barely reaching the wheels of a car. It was to rise much higher. |
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| Water is seen at a distance - behind the scooter. It was at shoulder height a little beyond. About 700 people were apparently evacuated from apartments beyond - as per fire service people whom I spoke with on the night of Dec 1st. People were getting ready to move to higher locations. Ground floor was expected to be flooded by late night - most people agreed. Water had entered 1st floor of buildings less than half a km away in low lying areas. |
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| See how water depth drastically increases within a short distance. About 100 feet beyond the people, flats in the ground floor had submerged. People had moved to flats in 1st and higher floors. |
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| One side of the road is flooded. Those were the days when people were driving on either side of the road with policemen watching! And people strolling and discussing standing in the middle of the road. |
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| Fallen tree added to confusion |
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| The left side is flooded, hence traffic is on the right side |
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| Vehicles parked in the middle of the road.. Raised no eyebrows those days. |
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| Water had reached 100m from where I lived. We were planning to evacuate, carrying essential stuff. Not knowing what would remain when we returned. One of our neighbors was very kind - he immediately offered to put us up in his 2nd floor flat. |
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| Solar power - view from the terrace on Dec 2nd. Terrace was a safer place |
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Smart guys started selling vegetables from a van. But I was wondering - those days there was no electricity (cellular network also went down and ATM's were not working either from Dec 3rd for a couple of days) - Without electricity, water could not be pumped. Where was the water to cook and wash? People were using whatever little water they had to cook. Was that the wisest use of water? There was a hotel nearby which continued to operate - wonder where they got vegetables, water, diesel for their electric generator from. And they didn't raise the rates of the items they served. Amazing. Hats off to the hotel owner. And so was a grocery store (part of a chain) where the boys and girls working there stayed there overnight. The boys unshaven and the girls in nighties were at the cash counter. They were selling essential commodities at lower prices than normal. My eyes still water. These were heroes, unsung.
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| After water started receding. And no - there were no steps as you walked forward. And I never thought that the road had a slope. River water was entering from the other side. |
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| After the worst was over. It still took a couple more days for water to recede completely. The cars above were about 200 feet from where I stood. Never knew that the place was so low lying. The building at the far end was the local office of the Metro Water |
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| We walked, we trudged through water, Once you came back home, your feet felt yucky. Friends I knew had blisters having spent most of their time in water. A friend told me that their family avoided eating much, so they didn't want to use the toilet much. Some chose to flush their toilets after every few usages instead of every time. Scarcity of water in the midst of so much water. And it wasn't very different in other houses and families. |
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| The first boat that I spotted on the road. I hurriedly took a photo. I was to find many moored boats in the next couple of days in the area. |
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| A building's underground parking lot: what a mess this parking lot had become. And it remained so for many days after water had receded. |
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| Moon like crater. This is a main road. |
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| Notice the guy climbing down the ladder between the two orange suited guys (National Disaster rescue team). The guy was climbing down from the 1st floor. Ground floor is more or less gone (submerged). Between the street where the dinghy is and Adyar river is one more street. There are more shots of this scene coming up. |
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| More people climbing down. The disaster team and the army and volunteers were doing a great job. But it was sad to see many of them sitting idly while in some areas (as in the picture above) people were in desperate shape. - No water, no electricity, no house. Sludge, sewage entered many houses. |
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| Zoomed out shot. See how much of the car is under water. So much household stuff was thrown away in the days to come, mostly from houses in the ground floor. I doubt whether many people had insured their household stuff. |
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| Normalcy returning, only ankle deep water. |
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| Not often do you see 2 boats parked by the side of the road while a car passes by. See also below. |
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| Boats parked on the main road. |
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A wall of one of the biggest houses in the area - broken.
Photo above and below. |
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| Now we know how boats are transported. Vans transport objects and they also transport other modes of transport like boats. I am reminded of the Thirukkural: Thupparkku thuppaya thuppakki... (surprisingly the Thiukkural was about rain!!) |
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| One of the most low lying areas - houses here suffered great damage and residents a lot of distress. |
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| View of that road - this road was one of the last to come out of water. I shudder to think of how people living in this road spent those 4 or 5 days. Most houses in this area went without electricity for upwards of a week. Some houses still go without electricity for a few hours or even a whole day frequently - till now (Dec 14, 2015). 12 Days after the deluge. Long back I read that the two most important things needed in a house was electricity and running water. Amen to that (Add internet also). |
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| Trying to pump the water out - not an easy task |
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| Part of the road caved in - and muck all over the place. Food packets were distributed to people. And what a mess we people create. Packets of half eaten food strewn all over. When I asked a policewoman whether it wouldn't be a good idea to provide a few trash cans where people were given food packets, she replied that when people's lives were in danger what was a few packets here and there. |
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| Of course, there were a lot of TV crews in this area. The place was famous across India for a couple of days. |
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| The wall of Boat Club / public park on the north side of the river broken due to the floods - on the far side. Zoomed in below. That place is in one of the most expensive areas of Chennai. |
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| Further zoomed in - garbage |
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| See the broken wall |
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| Of course many people came sight seeing - the bridge became a picnic spot. |
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| TV broadcaster above and cameraman below |
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| Suddenly people in the area seemed to be fairer in compleion and speaking fluent Hindi - plenty of north Indians in the teams from Army and Disaster Rescue forces. |
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Maybe we won't see boats on the roads anytime soon.
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| Sewage in our garden as on Dec 8, 2015. It hasn't improved much as of today despite umpteen visits to the local office of sewage department, calls to the Chennai Water's MD's office and despite logging a complaint on their website. I have not seen the sewage helpline number 4567 4567 work in the last 10 days. It's a sad state of affairs when complaints cannot be logged, when there is no one with necessary authority to complain to, that complaints cannot be logged, that complaints aren't tracked to closure, that complaint statistics in terms of numbers open, cycle time to closure aren't tracked. |
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| View of the eastern side of the garden - the stench is a little... |
As I finish this post, I can't help but wonder how it was in 1947 when thousands of people from both India and Pakistan were fleeing from their homes to reach the other side leaving all their belongings back. Imagine, for example, all the Sindhis - who left Karachi and other places in Sindh never to return. Or muslims from India who left for Pakistan from India. When I had my two small bags packed on Dec 2nd, I was thinking how lucky we were - what we experienced was just a natural disaster - far safer than it was in 1947. People weren't killing each other now. Quite the opposite.
Take also the tsunami or cyclone that hit Dhanushkodi in 1964 that washed away a train and where few hundred people died. The town of Dhanushkodi that exists today is a skeleton of the thriving place then. There was no early warning system in 1960s. The whole thing would have been over in an hour. The town changed to rumbles in double quick time. We, in Chennai, had time to pack and move to safer places. We had some kind of a warning that it was going to rain heavily. We heard that water from Chembarambakkam lake was being released @ x000 cusecs of water etc. We are a blessed lot compared to others who had little time to figure out anything.
Hopefully this experience would leave us better prepared to face future disasters. Have a little spare cash, a few power banks, spare water - learn to manage life without food and water and electricity and don't depend on state government. Maybe the cellular companies should buy a few power banks themselves so that their towers can be operational longer in the event that there is an electricity outage lasting many days.
On Dec 3rd and 4th, there was no electricity, water, buses, trains, planes, ATM's, phones (landlines and mobiles) - it was like we were living in the pre independence days. In all this crises, our milkman delivered milk everyday - the only change was that he came once instead of twice a day.
About 3 weeks after it was over: Dec 22nd 2015:
Photos of boys playing in the river:
Many companies, including Eureka Forbes (EF), have organized free services in their service centers for their products which might have been damaged by the rain and flood. I logged a call for free service a couple of days back.
Yesterday, I found that Eureka Forbes started a door to door sales camp to sell their AquaGuard range of water purifiers yesterday. While companies were trying to service their products, here is a company that was trying to sell their product - with so much unclean water all over, there is a need for clean water. The salesman visited our house to see whether we were interested to buy Aqua Guard.
The service call to EF I logged is yet to be attended to as of today (23rd Dec 2015). I am reminded of the American term "ambulance chasers" - lawyers who try to sell their (legal) service to people who meet with an accident - basically to sue the entity that caused the accident. If I am not mistaken EF is a company promoted by Pallonji Mistry, whose close relative is the head of the Tata group. It's sad to see a company, such as EF with close ties to Tata group, "chasing ambulances".
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