Gusty winds accompanied with heavy rains due to cyclone Tauktae led to several incidents of tree falling and water logging in the twin-city since Monday morning. Although no casualties were reported, a couple of vehicles including an auto-rickshaw was damaged due to tree falls. Heavy water logging was reported from low lying areas of the twin-city.
While 55 cases of tree falling were reported from the urban areas, 14 trees were uprooted in the coastal areas of Uttan near Bhayandar. This apart from a couple of stray cases in which tin-roofs of a tenement and a church was ripped off due to the extremely high wind speed and 80 incidents where branches of trees collapsed in the twin-city. Leaving apart a couple of complexes which witnessed outage due to heavy water logging, electric supply remained unaffected across the twin-city .
“Our entire team is on alert and are taking utmost care that no inconvenience is caused to the citizens and roads being cleared immediately after getting information about tree fall incidents in the region.” said Prakash Borade, chief fire officer, MBMC. In some areas people had to wade through knee-deep water, as there were no adequate motor pumps to drain out water.
Out of the 305 fishing boats from Uttan and adjoining coastal areas which had ventured into the Arabian Sea, 304 boats had safely returned to harbour till Sunday, in view of the Cyclone Tauktae, only one them- New Help Mary Boat with nine fishermen on-board has remained stranded 10 nautical miles off the Uttan coast due to the choppy weather.
However, the crew members are safe and the district administration along with the coast guard personnel are taking all efforts to ensure that the boat is safely towed to the harbour at the earliest, officials said. According to MBMC’s disaster management department, the region had received 170 mm rainfall till 4 pm.
