The great Mumbai DELUGE !	July 26, 2005 - The wettest day in Mumbai's memory. When the skies opened with a fury unheard of in a century, the city of 15 million people, nearly drowned in the resultant deluge. India's commercial capital, which contributes more than $13 billion annually to national revenue, looked helpless like a ravaged city of refugees. The people, die-hard workaholics, who normally waded through their monsoon days nonchalantly, found themselves stranded and scrambling for safety. More than 1000 people died and property losses were estimated at around Rs 15,000 crores. In terms of cold and wet statistics, 26/7 received 944.2 mm of rainfall, an all time record. The city vying for a place in the sun as another Shanghai, found its infrastructure battered and its image shattered. With the city's sewers getting clogged with urban waste, the gutters overflowed like rivers in spate, rising up to 18 feet at some places. For a while, the city became a vast sheet of swirling water. Old houses leaked and collapsed, bloated animals floated in the streets, and landslides brought down the shacks in rolling rocks and mud, burying people alive. The Arabian Sea, which cradled the city with lullaby waves at normal times, rose in high tide on that day. The suburban train service, the city's lifeline that carried daily nearly six million people to and fro, ground to a halt, at some places unable to plough through the flooding waters. All flights were cancelled or rescheduled and a lone Lufthansa plane circled over the country's busiest airport, like a lost bird, searching for the landing strip, lying submerged under a sheet of water. Stranded office employees stayed put overnight at work places, reaching home the next day, partly by rail, partly by bus and mostly by foot, taking 12 to 15 hours to finally make it. Thousands of howling kids were stuck at their schools without food and water. The city streets were littered with abandoned cars, their occupants having fled the flooded vehicles for safety. Telephones went dead and non-stop ring-tones of a million cell phones became mute. Vast areas of the city turned dark at noon for want of power. That's how that nightmarish day got embedded in the collective memory of the city to stay there forever; to be told and retold like a folktale to grandchildren, probably till the next deluge. With no rescue operations in place, Mumbai's residents were left to fend for themselves. But the deluge brought the best out of people. They helped each other. Tea and biscuits were served to the wayfarers wearily trudging home. There were stories of heroism; people risking their lives to save others. There were tale of horror and humanity, of tears and joy. Everybody had a tale to tell. There was a lesson for the urban planners to learn in this deluge. While the southern part of the city was largely unaffected, it was the overdeveloped northern suburbs that bore the brunt. Slums built on the edges of the sewers and gutters and the Mithi river that flows through the city, have resulted in the flooding. Concretization of large areas of the city and removal of mangrove marshes further aggravated the situation. Starved of space, the city could only grow vertically, imposing severe burden on the existing infrastructure. The deluge, though unprecedented, rudely exposed Mumbai's lack of preparedness to meet a disaster. It raised more questions than the concerned authorities could answer. Why wasn't the weather alert issued? Why did the drainage system so utterly fail? Who would bring back to life those who died for no fault of theirs? Who will compensate for the loss of property? Was the disaster man-made? Is these any guarantee that the situation will not be repeated during the next monsoon?