Contractors will be held accountable for flooding

According to a Chennai Corporation official, the decision was taken at a monsoon preparedness meeting held at Ripon Buildings on Tuesday, in which the Commissioner G Prakash directed the officials to desilt storm water drains across the city. “Commissioner also decentralised and delegated powers to regional deputy commissioners to carry out desilting of drains to float emergency tenders. Contractors will face action if the drains they built serve no purpose,” the official said.

It is learnt that of the total 2,000 kilometres of storm water drain network in the city, the civic body has already identified around 1,600 kilometres of drains with silt, which is to be removed before the monsoon. The civic body would desilt all the drains and store the removed mud in Perungudi and Kodungaiyur dumping yard.

As the civic body is lacking sophisticated devices to remove silt from the storm water drains, it has also decided to procure recycler vehicles. “The plan is to procure seven recycler vehicles. The vehicles would suck the mud from the drains and separate water from the mud to use the water again to suck more mud. We have conducted a trial run and found the result satisfactory,” L Nandakumar, chief engineer (storm water drains), said.

He added that the civic officials have visited 2.35 buildings till now and identified more than 60,000 buildings without rainwater harvesting structures. “If all the buildings have rainwater harvesting structures, only excess water would runoff to streets. These structures, apart from recharging groundwater, would control flooding,” Nandakumar said.