A day after hard rain brought the city to its knees, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) officials were on Sunday at pains to clarify that the situation was under control and cited the clearance of water from flooded areas.
56 vehicles fitted with generators and pumps were deployed and 589 additional workers to drain out water from flooded areas. And, water has indeed been cleared from a majority of the 78 inundated localities, GHMC Commissioner MT Krishna Babu said. But could they have responded better to Friday night’s unexpected rainfall? The GHMC’s Central Emergency Squad-Disaster Response has received 120 complaints since then and officials admitted they had faced innumerable problems in attending to them. The squad, which covers the five zones in the twin cities, has only six trucks with water pumps, tree cutters and other machines. The complaints they received ranged from water logging (70) and tree felling (32) to collapsed walls (3). Several localities across the were hit hard by the rain. The most badly affected areas included Nadeem colony, Grammar colony near Tolichowki, Afzal Sagar nala near Mallepally, Vidyanagar, Padmanagar, Mytrivanam etc.
While the central emergency team is being flooded with complaints, the officers in charge said they were short of staff and support to deal with such emergencies. “The rains have flooded a good part of the city and we were definitely not able to attend to all the complaints. We are taking care of major complaints first,” admitted a GHMC official on condition of anonymity. “At Towlichowki, the worst-hit area, the water level needs to be decreased first, and given the amount of water overflowing from the nalas, we are not able to find a solution quick enough,” he said. The wing had recently informed Mayor Mohd Majid Hussain about the shortage of manpower and equipment but nothing has been done about it so far.
The GHMC Commissioner explained that senior officials of the rank of additional commissioners and city planners had been deputed to each circle to coordinate with the deputy and zonal commissioners. Similarly, he issued orders posting officers to tackle emergencies during monsoon season at night in addition to the existing Emergency Cell and Control Room. This was being done in view of the incessant rains in and around Hyderabad, with most colonies being inundated and several complaints coming in at night.
But insiders say this kind of quick-fix solutions can only give temporary relief to the citizens and if there’s heavy rainfall again, the situation would be just as bad. When contacted, R Dhan Singh, engineer-in-chief, GHMC, said, “There are plans to remodel the entire system of nalas so that flooding does not occur. A number of of houses are built directly on kuntas (lakes).”
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