Navi Mumbai has recorded 3959.60 mm rainfall this year, the highest in last two years till September 27. Last year, till September 27, the rainfall recorded was 2499.07 mm and in the year 2022 it was 2910.76. However, in 2021, the rainfall recorded was higher which was 3086.12 mm.
After a dry spell of about a week, the city has started witnessing rain again since Wednesday. In three days, around 214 mm of rainfall was recorded of which, an average of 123mm was recorded on Wednesday alone. The highest rainfall was recorded between Vashi and Ghansoli and the low lying areas of these nodes witnessed flooding at several spots.
Even as the disaster management cell of Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation (NMMC), has claimed that the ‘regular’ low lying areas were the only places that witnessed flooding, the environmentalists have argues that the ‘planned city’- Navi Mumbai- should not get flooded by such sudden rains.
“The city has a series of holding ponds which are created with the Dutch technology and is meant to take control of the flooding but the rains of Wednesday alone was enough to prove it wrong,” NatConnect foundation director BN Kumar said.
The holding ponds are built with flap gates that shut during the high tide and thus block the sea water entering the pond. At the same, the ponds are meant to hold the drain and storm water and release them into the sea as the flap gates push open from inside the waterbody once the high tides recede.
Roads in several places in Vashi, however, got flooded during the Wednesday night rain despite the holding pond, due to the clogging of storm water drains, Kumar added. The massive redevelopment activity in particularly sectors 9 and 10 of Vashi has led to huge digging and debris that flows into the drain with heavy rains, he claimed.
“We had raised an alarm against the debris mounds at various redevelopment sites and the Municipal Corporation has served notices on builders,” he said. But there must be proper monitoring of the compliance of notices which obviously is missing, he said.
Meanwhile, an official from Corporation said that the water logging was not a major problem in the city and it happened due to heavy rainfall of about 90 mm just in one hour. The water started subsiding as the rain reduced.
