City faces ‘low pressure’ threat on Ashtami as many areas still inundated

As the Kolkatans today tried to gather bits and pieces left after the record rainfall to return to normal life and prepare for the approaching festival, the Met department tipped a wet Maha Panchami this year.

Another weather system brewing in Bay of Bengal anticipated to bring rains on Saturday could play a spoilsport for the pandal hoppers on 27 September.

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The city civic body meanwhile is facing hindrance in ‘bustee’ areas due to inaccessible lanes, said officials.

The low-pressure area over north Odisha and Gangetic West Bengal that had wreaked havoc in Kolkata yesterday weakened and became less marked today. However, after a brief respite, the south Bengal region is expected to rerun into rainy days during the peak festive days.

The Regional Meteorological Centre has issued a forecast of yet another system taking shape tomorrow. The system is tipped to turn into a ‘depression’ on 26 September and then intensify into a ‘deep depression’ the next day. On Saturday, when people would be celebrating Maha Panchami, the deep depression could enter land near the coastal belts of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. Even though the deep depression is predicted to affect mainly the two states, the coastal districts of West Bengal, including South 24-Parganas, Jhargram East Midnapore and West Midnapore are tipped to get heavy rainfall on that day. As predicted by the weather scientists, Kolkata and its adjoining areas are anticipated to get moderate rainfall on Maha Panchami.

However, the weather officials are not ruling out the possibility that the intensity of the rainfall could increase and the city could get ‘heavy’ rains under the impact of the approaching deep depression. The weather scientists are anticipating that the rainfall would not be restricted to Panchami day only. A third depression or low pressure is on the radar around 30 September (Ashtami) which could bring rains by 1 or 2 October.

Kolkata registered a record rainfall of more than 185mm within five hours yesterday. Some of the pockets in the city received record rainfall overnight. The highest rainfall was recorded in Garia, which was pounded by heavy showers of 340mm in 24 hours, according to the KMC data. Jodhpur Park and Kalighat also recorded rainfall of 290 and 297 mm respectively, a figure which was unprecedented in the recent decades. The rainfall of above 285 mm in 24 hours, inundated the city that had not seen such waterlogging after 1978.

The high tide played a hindrance in draining out the water from the city during the period of heavy rainfall as the lock gates could not be opened then, sources at Kolkata Municipal Corporation said that apart from the control, the civic body opened all its 82 pumping stations. The KMC also deployed more than 200 portable pumping stations to drain out the excess water from low lying areas. However, what played one of the most crucial roles was a machine called ‘super sucker’ procured by the civic body in the recent past. The KMC is said to have procured eight such machines at a cost of about three crores the most recent being from a private company in Jaipur. “If the sum of the inlets is clogged with silt, it will not be able to take in the water from the sewer line.

As elaborated by the official, one of the reasons for some of the pockets still being under water is because of the inaccessibility of the desalting machines into narrow bylanes particularly in ‘bastee’ areas. “Also unless the pressure of the bigger sewer lines is lesser, it will not be able to allow water from the smaller and narrower lines. As some of the bigger sewer lines still have swelling water levels, the narrower and smaller lines are unable to drain out the water. In addition, at some places, the junction of the smaller lines and the bigger line could be clogged resulting in continued inundation in few pockets in the city,” he added.