WHEN IT RAINS IT REALLY POURS
In a conversation with friends in New York City last night, the conversation turned to the record rainfalls that have taken over a 1,000 lives in and around the city of Mumbai (aka Bombay) in India in recent days.
For those of you unfamiliar with India, Mumbai could be viewed as two-thirds New York, and one-third Hollywood, since besides being a commercial capital of the nation, it's also the home for the largest movie industry in the world, which also goes by the name Bollywood.
The populations are somewhat similar, with around 17.5 million for Bombay vs. around 18 million for New York.
The reason for this focus, is that these headlines finally hit home today as I was catching up on my weekly global news. From the Guardian:
Flooding and landslides caused by devastating monsoon rains in western India have now claimed more than 1,000 lives, a senior Indian official said today.
Since Mumbai - formerly known as Bombay - and the surrounding area in Maharashtra state were last week hit by the worst rainfall since records began in 1846, the aftermath of the storms has continued to claim victims.
According to the state's chief secretary, Prem Kumar, some districts remain flooded and 200,000 people are being housed in more than 200 emergency camps. Around 70,000 people who fled the rains have now returned to their homes.
It's always easy to be relatively blase about news like this, especially since events like this are typically not as well covered by the mainstream press here.
This excerpt from the Asian Wall Street Journal (via the India Uncut Blog) is particularly poignant...I've only added the translation of 944mm into inches, courtesy Google:
One moment you are connected to the world in a global hub of the worldwide village; the next, the lights go off, the phone networks cease to function, and the water rises outside, creeping up on cars and first-floor apartments like an insidious idea. What does it take to shut down South Asia’s financial capital, Bombay? A few hours of rain, that’s all.
On July 26, Bombay received 944 millimeters (37.1 inches) of rainfall, the highest ever-recorded in India, and more than the average for a season in the city. (London gets less in a year.) The city ceased to function. Power and telecommunications went dead in parts of the city, the airport shut down and trains stopped running. Traffic came to a halt, as if the vehicles on the street were stuck to it. The water rose as high as 15 feet in some suburbs, and the highways looked like rivers from where the poor wet crow flies. People across the city were rendered immobile and incommunicado, as a modern city was shut down by an ancient element: water.
Water is to Bombay what Kryptonite is to Superman. Normally this is a city where nothing stops. It swirls with movement, seemingly chaotic but always purposeful, and even in the late hours of the night, when the rest of Indian sleeps, Bombay buzzes with activity, connected to the rest of the world, bearing the fortunes of India. Unless it rains heavily.
Pretty intense article, along with the following additional posts at a blog focusing on the post July 26 rains, Cloudburst Mumbai.
But I wanted to understand what "record rains" of 37 inches in a day in Mumbai meant and put in in a context I could relate to...so I did a little digging.
So I looked up the average "precipitation" for New York in a year, which comes out to around 45 inches in a year (via hypertextbook). But 28 inches of that is snow, so the average rainfall comes out to 17 inches in a year.
And New York is apparently number two in the nation in terms of annual precipitation after Miami at 60 inches.
Looking at some of the pictures of the rains in Mumbai, brought to mind some of the fictional images from recent movies of New York flooded by catastrophic waters, like last year's "The Day After Tomorrow".
For more detailed description of the rains, I'd recommend these two posts (one and two) from Sepia Mutiny, which have a number of additional links to explore.
Now when I go out into the unseasonably hot and humid streets of New York City this weekend, I just remind myself how much more worse it can be, especially when I take a gander at Mumbai's upcoming ten day forecast.
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