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With incessant rains over the weekend, Delhi has reported at least 33 cases related to portions of houses collapsing since Saturday, officials said.
As the complaints continued to be reported by residents, Municipal Corporation of Delhi officials said that they will launch a fresh survey to identify buildings that are dangerous for residential purposes in areas from where the latest incident were reported.
Read here: North India rain toll rises as water level turns dangerous
Delhi Fire Services (DFS) officials said the fire control room received 28 calls related to collapse of houses, portions of walls, roofs or balconies on Saturday and Sunday – the maximum during monsoons in the past 20 years. The frequent calls kept the fire tenders and firemen busy in rescue and debris removal operations throughout the two days, said DFS director Atul Garg.
“Although we don’t have readily available data from the previous years, the number of calls related to house or wall collapse incidents that we received on Saturday and Sunday was the highest in the past 20 years. On average, three to four such calls were received during rains. The situation this time was unprecedented, but it did not affect our functioning much because fire-related calls are minimal during rains. The only issue we faced was delays in reaching the incident spots because our fire tenders negotiated waterlogged roads,” said Garg.
On Monday, house collapse complaints were received from Jangpura, Chawri Bazar, Sheikh Sarai, Budh Vihar and Indra Bazar, near Bara Hindu Rao. Nobody died in any incident, Garg said.
MCD carries out an annual survey to identify dangerous structures but the surveys repeatedly fail to prevent such incidents. The MCD spokesperson on Monday said that the corporation completed the building survey on July 6. “In view of unprecedented rainfall in Delhi, the engineering staff been asked to keep a vigil on buildings and structures in their respective zones,” he added. An MCD official overseeing the exercise said that a fresh survey will be undertaken in vulnerable areas such as Old Delhi and unauthoirsed colonies where continuous water seepage over the last three days may have weakened structures.
According to the MCD survey, 57 of the 3.07 million structures surveyed in the exercise that began in May were found to be in a “dangerous condition”. Another 192 buildings were earmarked for repairs, the survey said.
BJP spokesperson Praveen Shankar Kapoor said that the survey report was “joke” on people of Delhi. “In entire Delhi, they have managed to find only 57 structures. We can show more such structures in the Old Delhi’s two wards alone,” he added.
Read here: Rain-heavy system over north likely to subside by today, to shift to east: IMD
Dheeraj Dubey, who heads the Walled City Residential Welfare Federation — a collective of RWAs in Old Delhi — said numerous incidents of building collapse take place in the area every year during the monsoon, and the agencies just pay lip-service. “There are many dangerous buildings in this area. Maintenance and retrofitting of such buildings should be carried out all through the year. The promises of revamp are made after every building collapse incident, but then everyone forgets the issue. Many of these old buildings are heritage structures with multiple ownership and disputes. Moreover, there are so many agencies operating in the walled city that it becomes difficult to assign responsibility. There must be one authority to look after this area,” Dubey said.
Karn Pratap Singh has been writing on crime, policing, and issues of safety in Delhi for almost a decade. He covers high-intensity spot news, including terror strikes, serial blasts and security threats in the national capital.
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