Floods in drought season: is this the future for parts of India?.
It is possible to be killed by floods in Mumbai, but not really to be surprised by them.
More than 20 people are dead: swept away or crushed as multi-storey buildings collapsed.
Bodies are still washing ashore.
Like Mumbai, though, these are places accustomed to flooding.
“Don’t put blame.” Well, we do put blame, and object to state incompetence, reckless urbanisation and failures of disaster response.
In Mumbai and Assam, recent floods have occurred where flooding is traditional, but no longer for traditional reasons.
The storm in Mumbai deposited 15% of the city’s annual rainfall in a single day.
Climate change models predict that they will become more frequent and proliferate into parts of India never thought of as monsoon hotspots, where the pumps are even less likely to be primed.
Extreme rain events mean that, as environmental scientist Sunita Narain put it, “floods in the time of drought are India’s new normal”.