Delhi floods and Bluelines/ august 2007

When we were writing our page on urban floods, sitting in Delhi, the experts had told us that the capital does not have a fraction of Mumbai's capacity to deal with floods. And they seemed so correct last week when the monsoon came back to Delhi after a vacation. It only took a few hours of rains for every crossing from ITO to Dhaula Kuan to get innundated. God forbid that we get the kind of rains that Mumbai got back in 2005, when it poured nonstop for 24 hours.
In a capital which was already held at ransom by the withdrawal of Bluelines for inspections, the rains just added to the choas and confusion on the roads. With hardly 3 or 4 Bluelines running on each route, waiting for them at the open bus stops just added to the stormy nightmare. Getting into the buses also proved to be a test of one's patience with these buses crawling through the cities' water logged roads at a snail's pace. The ones who caught the buses were the lucky ones but even they had to get wet and dirty, when asked by the conducters to get down and give the buses a push.