When Chennai started receiving her first spell of 'November rains' in the first week of November, little did Chennaiites imagine in the faintest of their imaginations that these torrential rains were bound to make an indelible impact on the history and geography of their City.
It indeed did!
I
was in Trichy, on the fateful day on 13 November 2015, on the invite of Professor Dr. C.
Dhanabal to conduct a workshop for school teachers, when my courteous neighbour of two
years Mr. Dhanaraj called me up from Chennai and said that the water levels are
rising up, and ‘It looks like your bike will soon go under water. Please take
it out and leave it at some safer place’, he exhorted.
My hands were tied, as I
was 320 kms away from namma Chennai,
and so, after having alerted my wife (who was on duty herself) and my family members, I promptly asked my friend Deva to help me out.
He promptly went there amidst the
torrential rains, and soon retrieved the bike to safety. But he also added that
the water level is slowly rising, and asked me to come back asap!
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| The barely visible balcony of our friend's house gone completely under water |
I
didn’t realize the intensity of the situation until he took photos of the same
and sent it via whatsapp. So after finishing my morning session for the
teachers, I rushed back to Chennai by my car, not being able to spend quality
time with my good friend Dr. Benet, who had driven all the way to Heber just to
meet up with me!
By
the time I reached home, it was an incessant downpour, and water had seeped in through the main doors of the house, and things were looking really really bad!
With the help of my good friends and relatives (help-in-time-of-need), managed
to shift [in order of priority!], most of the important things to the first floor, and by the time we finished
half the work and came downstairs, the water level had risen to four feet!
It
was indeed a great shock for us, as we’ve never witnessed these torrential
rains in a long long time and never had water come anywhere near the main doors
as well!
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| Our friend's Car - barely visible! |
Now,
we literally waded through the ‘by now hip-deep waters’ to reach our car, and somehow
managed to come to safety!
We
thought that the flood waters would come down in a couple of weeks, but we were
wrong!
Flood
waters indeed run deep!
The
remaining three weeks were really really horrible to say the least! Rains only
increased by the day, and by December 1, (when the second spell of torrential rains
hit the city) the city was in complete disarray.
Now, since our area Councillor Mr. Immanuel is a very good friend and an ‘everready’
help in time of need, we decided to step in and help him out in cleaning up the
‘historic’ mess that had engulfed our vicinities.
Mr. Sasikumar, Mr. Rajamanickam, Mr. Sudhakar,
Mr. Pandu, along with a whole bunch of youngsters, with our area’s auto drivers
and shopkeepers for company, decided to plunge into ‘service mode!’.
Soon,
under the supervision of our Councilor, ‘four-foot deep’ Waterways were dug up
using the Poclain excavators, and in no time a mini aqueduct was right there in
front of us conveying the dangerous flood waters in a ‘disciplined’ manner!
Even
as we were walking across the length and breadth of our beautiful little town, assessing the alarming intensity of the havoc, we
were petrified to the core to find one whole nagar (Gajalakshmi Nagar) gone
down in the floods, and just the first floors of many houses in the vicinity alone
barely visible, that too placing them only by looking at their balconies!
Hundreds
of hutments and individual houses had totally submerged in the floods!
We
called in boats to rescue us, and they reached us in about two hours’ time, and
rescued at least 15 families marooned in the massive deluge! Service-minded
youngsters from all walks of life joined us in reaching out to our fellow human
beings in this hour of crisis!
When
the first batch of flood-relief came by, we were not prepared to tackle the situation!
So there was a hullaballoo of frantic proportions all over the place!
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| Our Vicinity on 'Service Mode' |
As
the saying goes, ‘It’s not how we make mistakes, but how we correct them that
defines us’, the second time around we were on the watch!
This
time, with the help of our councilor, we called in the police for help to
coordinate relief work, and they were promptly there in no time!
The time (1
pm) was announced to the people using megaphones (again, gladly gifted to us by
a benevolent Mr. Rupesh), and police and volunteers were in full guard from 12
noon itself. As people started pouring in, they were mindful of the order that
was restored, and towed the line!
Afternoon
lunch was served to around 3000 people and the basic essentials in ‘Food Packets’
were distributed to each of them.
Although
the work is going on at a steady pace, and many volunteers from apartments from
all walks of life have stepped in to lend a great helping hand, there were a
few impediments too that we had to tackle!
When
Aishwarya and her team with full enthu and verve, and ‘ms.benevolence’ writ
large in their hearts, went to a nearby locality (Nerkundram) to distribute
relief material in a mini-lorry, the ‘waiting’ victims of the floods, barged
into the lorry all of a sudden, and didn’t even allow them to distribute it! Shouts
of “Please wait, please take them one by one, please stand in line,” literally went
unheeded! She was all tears as she and her team narrated this incident to us.
Sometimes,
we could even witness violent youngsters who masquerade as victims barging in
and ‘plundering’ the relief material, much to the dismay and agony of the volunteering
youngsters. So we asked the ladies to wind up then and there! But by then, the
damage was done!
Secondly,
flood victims are on the roads literally all through the day, waiting for the next
lorry load of relief material to reach them!
Since there’s no coordination
amongst the volunteering fraternity, sometimes food packets meant for an afternoon
go down the drain as a colossal waste. Take for example, the brinji rice given
yesterday to the victims.
There were four groups of relief workers who came in
four huge vans to distribute brinji or veg rice to the flood victims. But since
the people had their full even in the first ‘helping’, all the excess food was
considered ‘surplus’!
Thirdly,
some people (not the Good Samaritans!) under the guise of relief workers are
charging exhorbitant sums to rescue people from their marooned houses! One of
our volunteers told us that, some (not all!) boatsmen got as much as Rs.500/-
for rescuing one family from their house, which was saddening to the core!
Fourthly,
when my friend Rajesh called up from Adyar and told me that, a team from
Bangalore which went to distribute relief material without the ‘blessings’ of
the local dons, was beaten up and the relief material that they had carried with
them all the way from Bangalore (containing a medicine kit, food packets and
clothing) were literally thrown into the flood waters!, we were all fuming with
indignation at this apathy of a section of the ‘dons’!
Added
to all these maladies, rumours of all hues and shades, purportedly through
social networking sites added to the fear and panic of the people!
Although
social networking sites like facebook and watsapp have done great service to
the people in this hour of crisis, some vested anti-social elements started
circulating watsapp messages predicting a deluge and some others warned about
escaped crocodiles, and yet others were misninforming people that petrol and
diesel outlets were dry, and still others were ‘busy’ informing their friends
that ‘this-and-that’ bridge has collapsed, this lake or river has had a levee
breach etc, all adding to the woes of this alarming crisis of a hundred years!
One
lesson (among many!) that could be learnt is the urgent and pressing
need for an entirely Autonomous Coordinating Agency for disaster management in
every district of the State!
This Coordinating Agency should be a purely
autonomous entity (on the likes of the Election Commission), vested with
administrative power to take ‘time & locale-specific’ decisions, which
could handle all aspects of disaster management including relief work,
rehabilitation of the affected families, having health inspectors to inspect
the quality of the food before they are distributed, Sanitation Inspectors to
periodically assess the unhygienic places and sanitizing them, promulgating
ESMA ‘kinda’ Acts to prevent disgruntled elements from obstructing relief work,
and empowering the local cops to take punitive action against rumour mongers! In this regard, we hope that the upcoming Panel Discussion on the Chennai Floods, by the Madras Institute of Development Studies, on 15 December is an affirmative step in that direction!
Now, even
as I am typing this post out to share my aches and aspirations on the flood
situation in namma Chennai, my neighbourhood
friends are busy going on their bikes unmindful of the incessant rains, with
food packets made & packeted in their small houses, to distribute to the
needy. So here I am prompted to put the full stop and get back to the call of
duty!
