MUMBAI: The onset of the yearly monsoon this year has brought life to a grinding halt in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, and has disrupted rail and road traffic in the city. Due to the rainfall, essential services workers like nurses and other medical staff engaged in treating COVID-19 patients were also unable to reach hospitals on time for their shifts. Aaditya Thackeray, Minister of Tourism and Environment, Government of Maharashtra, who visited several areas of the city during the rains, said that this is probably the heaviest rains since 2005 that Mumbai has experienced in years in a ’12 hour window’.
According to the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), several areas in the city received more than 200 mm of rainfall on Monday, August 3, and heavy showers are predicted to continue for the next 48 hours till Wednesday, August 6. A civic official said that several houses in low-lying areas like Kurla, Sion and Bhandup, were flooded due to the heavy downpour.
Meanwhile, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) appealed to residents to stay at home and urged commercial establishments, except those providing essential services, to remain closed on August 4 and 5. The Government of Maharashtra also announced a holiday for all its offices in Mumbai city and suburbs on Tuesday in view of the heavy rainfall in the metropolis and neighbouring areas. Moreover, local train services, which were being operated in the city for those working in the essential services sector, were suspended on some routes in Mumbai and the adjoining suburbs on the morning of August 4 due to water logging on rail tracks. Water-logging outside the civic-run Nair Hospital in central Mumbai, where several Covid-19 patients from the city are being treated, posed a problem for its medical staff. “Nurses and other medical staff have been struggling to reach the hospital due to water-logging in the premises and elsewhere,” a resident doctor from the hospital said.