Day after: Traffic snarls and inundation

Day after: Traffic snarls and inundation

With Several Areas Of Chennai Still Water-Logged, Experts Suggest Stormwater Drain Network Needs A Complete Rethink

Sindhu Kannan & Omjasvin MD | TNN

01.01.2022

The chaos on city roads continued on Friday with traffic snarls everywhere. The rain eased overnight, but the effects of Thursday’s cloudburst remained.

Roads were either damaged or flooded, and vehicles crawled through one lane, avoiding the stagnant rainwater.

Traffic cops were missing on many arterial roads. The result: traffic jams even during non peak hours.

Anna Salai and Saidapet witnessed huge jams during the morning and evening peak hours. The vehicles moved at a snail’s pace on Poonamallee high road, Santhome high road, portions of Dr Radhakrishnan Salai, Mandaiveli road, Choolai main road, De Mellows Road, Perambur Barracks Road, BB Road in Perambur, Paper Mills Road.

Vehicles plying towards Poonamallee from Porur piled up for at least two kilometres as people began leaving the city to celebrate New Year. Inward traffic was relatively less.

Vehicles also crawled on several arterial roads such as Eldams Road and T T K Road in Alwarpet, Khader Nawaz Khan Road in Nungambakkam, Rajamannar Road in K K Nagar, K P Dasan Road in Teynampet, Thirumalaipillai Road, Bazullah Road and Prakasam Road in T Nagar, and Sivagami Road in Perambur.

“It is water-logged everywhere and we were trying our best to streamline the traffic in the available space,” said a senior police officer.

Even though the Greater Chennai Corporation had at least three weeks in December to desilt the storm water drains, not much was done.

While officials said the city has not witnessed such a high single-day rainfall even in November, the reason for inundation was primarily because of silt-blockage and poor gradient of drains, say experts.

An independent study done by GIS expert Dhayanand Krishnan in T Nagar found that six crore litres of water is generated for 10 cm rain in 0. 7 square kilometers. “To carry this much water, the drains must be built in a uniform way from start to end. But it is not so. Drains are in various sizes across the stretch,” he said.

Krishnan said that the rains had stopped by midnight on Thursday but water did not drain even by Friday morning. The city had 271 spots with severe inundation. Of these, 44 were in Kodambakkam zone  and 42 in Royapuram

zone.

A civic official said 279 pumps had been deployed across the city, some of them in action even  on Friday evening.