Wednesday, December 02, 2015

Chennai’s collapse: City caves to high rainfall, make it liveable before plans to make it ‘smart’

Yet another deluge, coming close on the heels of the wettest November Chennai has seen in over a century, is something the city just could not cope with. Heavy rains on November 16 had exposed the appalling state of the civic infrastructure that was totally unprepared to handle the floods. Clogged and overflowing drains, inundated housing colonies, rotting garbage, electrocutions and roads caving in at many places showed how the civic body and town planning authorities have been flouting norms with impunity over the years.

The civic body chose to react to overwhelming public anger by engaging in blame games. The AIADMK-ruled corporation claimed that shoddy drain work by the previous DMK regime was largely responsible for the mess the city found itself in. Interestingly, the ban on manual scavenging was cited as the reason for the drains not being desilted well in time. The 119 cm rainfall the city received in November may be a record, but such heavy rain during the northeast monsoon is by no means an exception. Studies have shown that at least once in a decade the city has experienced very heavy rainfall.

This disaster has happened as urban planners have given scant regard to hydrological data, which should be the basis while drawing up plans for any functional city. Water bodies have been encroached on, ponds and lakebeds have been converted to residential townships and unauthorised buildings have sprung up all over the city. Chennai had 150 water bodies; now only 27 exist. Add to these a badly planned storm water drainage system that was built in isolation rather than as a network. This is the perfect recipe for disaster. We have indeed gone too far in tampering with nature.

As in the aftermath of any man-made disaster, we will likely see a flurry of activity among civic officials, government agencies and town planning authorities who will come out with grandiose schemes to prevent a repeat of the flooding being witnessed now. What the city needs is not rhetoric, but a scientific and practical solution based on the experience of other cities with lowlands, which have dealt with much more rainfall than Chennai has. The least civic body and town planners can do is make the city liveable before they draw up plans to make it ‘smart’. Source...

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