Mumbai Hit Hard By Heavy Rain, Rail, Air Traffic Disrupted

Picture : Twitter / ANI

Overnight heavy rains in Mumbai and its adjoining areas crippled normal life and disrupted rail and air traffic reported PTI.

Amidst the heavy downpour which continued to pound the city and its neighbouring areas, a 16-year-old boy was washed away in flood in the adjoining Palghar district, an official said.

Mumbai woke up to heavy downpour for the second day in a row, with no immediate respite likely as the weather office here predicted more showers throughout the day.

According to the city civic body, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has forecast intermittent rain with heavy to very heavy showers in the city and suburbs and extremely heavy rain at isolated places in next 24 hours.

The city, its neighbouring Thane and Palghar districts and Navi Mumbai town were witnessing incessant rains since last two days and a number of incidents of tree fall were reported from there, an official said.

In the last 24 hours, the city received 100 mm rain while the suburbs, Thane and Navi Mumbai got more than 250 mm downpour, IMD’s deputy director K S Hosalikar said.

Being a Sunday, most of the office-goers were spared of hardships caused by the suspension of local train services on various routes.

Due to the accumulation of water on tracks at a few sections following heavy and continuous rains, the Central Railway’s services on the Main Line and Harbour Line between the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (in Mumbai) and Karjat, Kasaraand Khopoli were suspended since 8 am, its chief spokesman Sunil Udasi said.

“This has been done as a precautionary measure to avoid hardships to commuters later…the situation will be reviewed every hour,” he said.

However, the train services on Trans-Harbour Line and fourth corridor of Kharkopar was running normally, he said.

Due to water-logging and crashing of boulders between Karjat (located in neighbouring Raigad district) and Lonavala hill town (in Pune district) in the Western Ghats section, several Mumbai-bound trains were terminated, diverted or cancelled, an official at the CR control room said.

The rail route from Pune to Mumbai was also closed, he added.

Besides local trains, some long distance trains like Duranto, Konark Express, Amritsar Express and Devgiri Express were stuck near Igatpuri (in Nashik district), and Aatgaon and Khardi near Kalyan, another Central Railway official said.