MUMBAI, July 29: Eighteen people died in a stampede in Mumbai on Thursday night after rumours that a lake had burst its banks. The deaths took the toll from days of rains flooding western India to over 900. Authorities in Mumbai began shifting debris to prevent the spread of disease and started counting the cost of the rains which paralysed the city for two days and left tens of thousands of people struggling to return to waterlogged homes.
People in a crowded slum in the north of the city of 15 million rushed out of their homes in pitch darkness late on Thursday, hearing rumours of floods that turned out to be unfounded.
“We didn’t quite understand what was going on, but everyone was rushing out of their houses and we also followed them,” one young mother told local television. “It was totally dark outside and in all the commotion a lot of people, especially women and children, got pushed down and trampled.”
Seven children were among the 18 killed in the stampede, police said. Authorities then used loudspeakers to calm panic-stricken residents.
“There were rumours of a lake bursting its banks ... and a tsunami that led to the stampede,” a police official said.
Mumbai’s mayor urged people not to listen to rumours.
“It’s easy to scare the people now as they have suffered a lot due to the flood,” Dalvi Dattaji said.
CLEAN-UP UNDERWAY: Relief coordinators put the city’s death toll around 400, nearly half the total for the western state of Maharashtra.
A landslide at a slum near the Mumbai suburb of Andheri killed 67 people, and efforts continued to retrieve more bodies believed to be buried in the rubble and mud.
“The number may rise, especially in Mumbai and Thane,” the Press Trust of India news agency quoted Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh as saying. “We are tackling the situation as a national calamity.”
Rescuers were still trying to recover the bodies of an estimated 100 people buried under an avalanche of mud in the village of Juigaon, 150kms south of Mumbai. Newspapers reported that 16 people had died in their cars in Mumbai, trapped by rising water levels which jammed the doors.
City authorities and health workers began clearing rubbish which had been washed onto the streets, spraying against mosquitoes and handing out medicine to stop diseases. “Our focus currently is to prevent outbreak of any major diseases. Wastes are being cleared on an urgent basis and we have advised people to drink only boiled water for the next four to five days,” the mayor said.
Meteorologists warned more rains may be on the way even as the city tried to get back to normal. Roads were clearing, trains were running more frequently and Mumbai’s airport began operating normally after being shut for two days.
Workers who had finally made it home on Thursday — after one or two nights in hotels, on office floors or on the street returned to work, and trading on financial markets resumed.
The chaos was a brutal reminder of Mumbai’s rickety infrastructure, despite a hugely ambitious six billion dollar plan to turn it into the next Shanghai.
AID PACKAGE: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, visiting the city on Thursday, announced a five billion rupees aid package for relief work, but the mayor said the city would require at least 10 billion rupees to repair damaged roads, rail and other infrastructure.
The federation of chambers of commerce said the loss of business income for the region was about seven billion rupees, 4.5 billion of that for Mumbai alone.—Reuters