Heavy rains in Mumbai lead to second deluge in a month
Near-record rainfall left vast areas of Mumbai under water on Wednesday, affecting suburban train services and flights and forcing authorities to shut down educational institutions for a day in the country’s financial capital.
As many as 183 passengers had a narrow escape when a SpiceJet flight overshot a wet runway while landing at the Mumbai airport and got stuck in mud on Tuesday night, officials said. The passengers were safely evacuated but more than 50 flights had to be diverted.
Between 8.30am Tuesday and 8.30am Wednesday, the Santacruz weather station, representative of Mumbai and its suburbs, recorded 303.7mm, and Colaba, representative of south Mumbai, recorded 210mm rain, the highest for south Mumbai this monsoon.
The city was just 14.5mm short of the all-time high 24-hour September rainfall of 318.2mm recorded on September 12, 1981. The last days’ rainfall was also the highest in a decade since the September 4, 2012 when the city received 185.3mm rain.
“The current satellite images tell us that the thick cloud patch over Mumbai has died down and moved over parts of south Gujarat. Heavy to very heavy rainfall levels are likely to reduce to light to moderate through Wednesday,” said KS Hosalikar, deputy director general western region, India Meteorological Department (IMD).
The IMD also forecast extremely heavy rainfall in Raigad district in the next 24 hours.The latest flooding comes less than a month after the city of 20 million people was pummelled by unusually high rainfall that brought the metropolis to its knees for at least two days.