Officials downplay waterlogging as city takes pounding

TNN | Nov 3, 2017, 00:02 IST

Cleared

Chennai: Downplaying the effects of the heavy downpours across the city was top of the agenda for corporation officials during the northeast monsoon review meeting at the Ripon Buildings complex on Thursday.

The irony was that officials were sitting inside an air-conditioned hall claiming to have solved waterlogging issues while being completely oblivious to the pounding the city was going through outside. Over 10 cm rainfall was recorded on Thursday night, inundating the Ripon Buildings premises too. But the commissioner and special officer D Karthikeyan suggested that the situation would be back to normal by morning.

Minister S P Velumani clarified his comments from two days ago, when he equated the corporation's handling of the crisis to cities in the US and UK. "When US cities flooded recently, we saw how they struggled to solve it. We are handling our city's problem the best way we can," he said.

"In areas like SIDCO Nagar in Villivakkam, localities are secure because of the storm drains we constructed," Karthikeyan said, in response to a TOI story on Thursday highlighting how SIDCO Nagar was no better than it was during the 2015 floods.

"There will be no water in SIDCO Nagar in the morning," he added, before driving away in knee deep water that had engulfed the Ripon Buildings complex.