18 die after power cut in flooded Chennai hospital – India bolsters relief

An Indian rescue helicopter lifts a man off the roof of an apartment building surrounded by floodwaters in Chennai on Friday.

With the water receding, the Chennai airport is expected to be operational for regular air services from Saturday.

Chennai is slowly limping back to normalcy but the city is still on edge as many areas witnessed heavy rains this morning.

In a statement late yesterday, the Reserve Bank of India, the country’s central bank, said it would remain open to support bank transactions and help supply cash to local lenders.

Fourteen patients in an intensive care unit in the southern Indian city of Chennai have died, taking the death toll in rain-related incidents to 325.

Climate change has been shown to make extreme weather events like flooding more likely and more intense, but it’s hard to say how much climate change played a role in any one weather event, including India’s floods.

The weathermen have predicted more downpour in the next two days due to a stagnant low pressure area over the Bay of Bengal.

■ National Disaster Response Force would send 20 more teams in addition to the already present 28. The Tamil Nadu public works department claimed that it had issued warnings but there had been a breakdown in media and phone communications.

The monsoon rains bring floods to many parts of India every year, usually from June to September.

Radhakrishnan said Saturday that while the immediate rescue operations were tapering off, the main focus of the government will be to prevent the spread of communicable diseases. “We hope that this will be of some assistance to those affected by the floods and demonstrate Singapore’s solidarity with the people of Tamil Nadu during this hard period”, Balakrishnan said. Vikram Kapur, a commissioner of the Chennai Corporation, a government body that administers the city, said that employees had gone to forewarn residents when the reservoir was opened up. Thousands of rescuers raced to evacuate residents from deadly flooding, as India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi went to the southern state of Tamil Nadu to survey the devastation.

Fish carts and two-wheelers were used to transport patients to hospitals during the past three days, said a hospital official. The high water has closed the airport and hundreds of passengers are stranded.

JAYA THANKS ODISHA, BIHAR Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa today thanked her Odisha and Bihar counterparts, Naveen Patnaik and Nitish Kumar, for their governments’ contribution of Rs 5 crore each to her state for flood relief. In carrying out, the relief and rescue operations for affected people by the heavy rains in Chennai there at the base navy officers play a key role.