Heaviest September rain in Kolkata in 14 years, large parts of city submerged – Hindustan Times

Heavy rains, triggered by a cyclonic circulation over Bay of Bengal, lashed Kolkata and its surrounding areas since Sunday night, inundating large parts of the city on Monday and led to suspension of circular rail operation, few long-distance trains getting rescheduled apart from disruptions in road traffic. However, authorities at the Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International (NSCBI) airport said that flight services were not affected.

The weather department said that it had never rained as much in Kolkata on a single day in September in the last 14 years. Till 8:30 am, Kolkata received around 142 mm rain, the highest since September 25, 2007, when 174 mm rain was recorded.

Several areas in the city such as Topsia, Ultadanga, Palmer Bazar, Ballygunge, Mominpur, Jodhpur Park, Chetla and Kalighat recorded more than 100 mm of rain since Sunday night, senior officials of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) said.

Meteorologists have issued an orange alert in Kolkata for Monday and a yellow alert for Tuesday. Red alert is the highest category of alert followed by orange and yellow.

On Tuesday, the western part of the state along with the coastal district of South 24 Parganas are likely to receive heavy rain.

Officials of the India Meteorological Department’s (IMD) regional office in Kolkata said that a cyclonic circulation that had developed over the sea moved towards the West Bengal coast, triggering the heavy rain.

“The situation is not good. It has been raining heavily since last night. Heavy waterlogging has been reported from several areas. What aggravated matters is that the city’s lock gates, which allow the storm water to drain out, had to be closed from 10:30 am to 3 pm as the high tide was coming in the Hooghly river. This resulted in more water logging,” said Tarak Singh, a member of the KMC’s board of administrators overseeing the drainage and sewerage department.

At Lake Gardens in south Kolkata, TMC parliamentarian (MP) Saugata Roy was seen wading through water while taking stock of the situation in his locality. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had to cancel some of its organisational meetings due to the waterlogging.

“I woke up and saw that the entire road in front of my house was under knee-deep water. I had two to three programs which I had to cancel,” he added.

“There were no reports of any major breaches in river embankments or any untoward incidents from the districts apart from waterlogging. Last week we had to evacuate more than 120,000 people in two districts as river embankments were beached by heavy rains and large areas in Paschim Medinipur and Purba Medinipur were flooded,” said a senior official of the state’s disaster management department.