Indian Rains Kill 32; Mumbai Badly Hit
Date: 05-Jul-06
Country: INDIA
The bad weather was caused by a depression over the east coast and a revival of the June-September annual monsoon rains which had hit a lean patch, leading to a dry spell across large swathes of the subcontinent.
At least 24 people were killed in the eastern states of Orissa and Jharkhand and several were missing in neighbouring West Bengal after torrential rains caused rivers to break their banks and triggered landslides, officials said.
Six people, including four women, were killed in a landslide in the coffee-growing Kodagu district in the southern state of Karnataka, police said.
Two people were washed away in flood waters, 10 fishermen were missing and thousands displaced in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh as hundreds of villages were inundated.
Navy boats and helicopters had been pressed in to rescue marooned people from rooftops and also to drop food, medicine and water packets, authorities said.
In Mumbai, the country's commercial capital, schools and colleges were shut and emergency workers flushed muddy waters from submerged streets as the bustling city struggled to cope with a second day of monsoon rains.
Weather officials said a depression on the east coast was weakening and was heading towards Mumbai. This would bring more rain to the city and the central state of Madhya Pradesh over the next few days, they warned.
(Reporting by Bappa Majumdar, Krittivas Mukherjee and S. Radha Kumar)