Thousands flee as floods engulf New Delhi

Thousands flee as floods engulf New Delhi

NEW DELHI (AFP): Thousands of people fled their homes in the Indian capital yesterday as flood waters from a rain-swollen river gushed into crowded residential districts of the city, officials here said.

State-run railways suspended train services as the army went on alert for a large-scale evacuation in case more areas were inundated by an enormous discharge of water from the adjoining flood-ravaged state of Haryana.

The city fire department, which rescued some 400 people trapped in their submerged homes, warned that the Yamuna River water level could reach a record high later yesterday.

"We are receiving distress calls every minute," a fire department spokesman said, adding that some eight residential and business districts had been flooded.

There have been no reports of deaths or injuries as a result of the latest flooding in New Delhi, but more than 600 people have died across India since the annual monsoon rains began in June.

Surging waters from Haryana overnight washed away a bridge spanning the Yamuna and submerged a three-kilometer stretch of road linking the city's eastern districts to the rest of the city, witnesses said.

Thousands of people living along the banks of the river were evacuated as the river breached its banks in several places, officials said.

New Delhi Chief Minister Madan Lal Khurana said he has asked his cabinet colleagues to supervise anti-flood operations and added that policemen in the hundreds had been deployed to help stranded people.

Railway authorities said train services to and from New Delhi were either cancelled or suspended as a vital railway bridge was threatened by the floods.

Commuters were stranded in the city's three main railway stations as the authorities also froze the suburban trains ferrying passengers to several towns ringing New Delhi.

Officials said the Haryana water overflow could trigger the worst floods since 1978, when vast stretches of New Delhi were under water for days, leading to one of India's largest airborne evacuation operations.

Meanwhile, the death toll from the collapse of a two-story building in the Himalayan state of Sikkim rose to 27 yesterday, the Press Trust of India said. Seven more bodies had been pulled from the ruins of the building which collapsed late Tuesday during heavy rains near Sikkim capital Gangtok.

Twenty-three people have been hospitalized and eight more were feared missing or dead yesterday.

In the northern hill state of Himachal Pradesh, army helicopters dropped medicine and food packets to some 7,000 stranded Hindu pilgrims and about 500 foreign and Indian tourists camping in two picturesque valleys.

The army has also begun evacuating tens of thousands of marooned people from submerged homes and farms in Haryana and Punjab, among the worst-hit states in northern India.