Mumbai: Not fully operational, flood warning system didn’t help

MUMBAI: A

flood forecasting

and warning system for the city, launched by the state government last year, is not yet fully operational and did not give any warning of

Saturday night’s

heavy rain, said BMC officials.

Besides, the installation of four more

Doppler weather

radars — two in the city, and one each in Thane and Navi Mumbai — to get a more accurate weather forecast is also delayed, though these were supposed to be ready by the 2020 monsoon.

The Integrated

Flood Warning System

for Mumbai (iFLOWS-Mumbai) is one of just two such urban

flood

warning systems in the country — the other being in Chennai — developed by the ministry of earth science (MoES) through collaborations with top research institutions.

The MoES initiated the development of iFLOWS-Mumbai in July 2019 using in-house expertise in close coordination with the BMC, and was formally launched by chief minister Uddhav Thackeray and the then union minister Harsh Vardhan on June 12 last year.

The system is supposed to provide early warning for flooding during high rainfall events and cyclones, using detailed topographical data to generate highly localised pictures of inundation as early as two days ahead of the event.

There was no extreme rain event warning for Saturday night from the IMD, said a civic official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. This may have been because there were no typical monsoon systems such as a low pressure area over the Bay of Bengal or monsoon trough, making the event tough to predict, said experts. The heavy rain was due to in situ convective clouds, said an official. A query to Dr Jayanta Sarkar, scientist and head, IMD (Mumbai), went unanswered.

“For such storms, we need the radar,” said Akshay Deoras, an independent meteorologist. “However, the radar is currently producing images at one-hour intervals — as against the optimum 15 minutes — and this is too late for real-time disaster management.”