The record heavy rain that has been pounding Odisha for 24 hours has claimed the lives of at least three persons, hit over 19.53 lakh people, and inundated extensive areas in 11 districts, prompting authorities to launch evacuation of people from low lying areas on Monday, officials said.
The capital city of Bhubaneswar received 195 mm rainfall in 24 hours, breaking a 63-year-old record, while the pilgrim town of Puri recorded 341 mm, the highest in 88 years, during the period as rain clobbered large parts of the state, they said.
The pilgrim town had received 210.8 mm rain on September 2, 1934, the officials said.
Waterlogging was reported from several areas of Bhubaneswar as the state capital recorded 195 mm rainfall in 24 hours till 8.30 am on Monday.
A senior official at the Special Relief Commissioner’s office said heavy rains during the past three days triggered by a depression in the Bay of Bengal have left a trail of devastation in at least 53 blocks spread over 11 districts of the state.
It has affected over 19.53 lakh people in 2,789 villages and 14 urban local bodies, he said.
As the rain lashed most parts of the densely populated coastal region of the state, the administration by Monday evening evacuated 3,819 people from low-lying areas and provided cooked and dry food to the evacuees in different shelters.
According to the preliminary assessment, 265 kutcha houses have been damaged while as many as 24 villages are marooned. Twenty villages have been marooned in the Koraput district, while coastal Puri has three and Cuttack one.
The Regional Meteorological Centre of India Meteorological Department (IMD) on Tuesday predicted that the depression over north Odisha would weaken into a depression today. The Met Centre has issued a red warning for heavy to very heavy rainfall at a few places with extremely heavy (>20cm) rainfall at one or two places over the districts of Sambalpur, Deogarh, Angul, Sonepur, Dhenkanal, Jharsuguda, and Bargarh on Tuesday. The East Coast Railways, on Tuesday, has cancelled 12 trains, diverted routes of eight others and short terminated another after a goods train derailed on the Angul-Talcher road route on Tuesday due to a heavy downpour under the influence of deep depression over the Bay of Bengal.
