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Mumbai warns residents as heavy rains pound city

"For so many days we have been lifting the bodies of the dead and now we are clearing animals from the roads. Is this our work?"

Hafeez Irani, a Mumbai resident

Authorities warned residents to remain at home yesterday after heavy rains began falling again across Mumbai and the surrounding state, which were hammered last week by devastating floods.

Cleanup efforts and the distribution of food supplies to needy residents were badly slowed by the renewed monsoon rains, which began early yesterday morning, and aviation officials ordered the city's airports, the busiest in the country, closed because of poor visibility. The airports reopened at around noon after a seven-hour shutdown.

Officials, meanwhile, said the death toll from the recent rains could reach 1,000.

The recovery over the weekend of more than 100 bodies pushed the official death toll to 899. Yesterday, officials said more bodies were likely to be recovered from the flood-devastated Raigad district.

"The bodies are still coming out. There will be another 100 or so," said K. Vatsa, state rehabilitation secretary. "The toll will definitely be around 1,000."

With renewed rains pounding the city, the Mumbai police issued an alert cautioning people to stay home because of rising water levels.

"We're asking people to travel only if essential," said Mumbai's police chief A.N. Roy.

Five days after crippling rains pounded western India -- reaching a record 94cm in suburban Mumbai -- soldiers, civil defense teams and aid workers continued to find bodies from the state's worst-affected districts: Raigad, Ratnagiri, Thane, Parbhani, Nanded and Kolhapur.

But incessant rainfall and mounds of debris, boulders and mud tangled into the wooden and tin remains of people's homes were making it a challenge to pull out the remaining bodies.

"The rains are making retrieval difficult," Vatsa said.

Nearly 200 medical teams from Mumbai have set out for more than 300 villages across the state. Civic authorities have deployed health workers in the Mumbai suburbs to distribute medicines and disinfectants to guard against the spread of waterborne diseases.

As many as 418 people were killed in Mumbai -- most of them drowned, buried by landslides or electrocuted.

Government and relief officials say there is little likelihood of finding more survivors.

Yesterday, electricity was gradually restored to many northern Mumbai neighborhoods a day after angry demonstrators blocked traffic demanding restoration of clean drinking water, power and the cleanup of garbage and decomposing animal carcasses.

Residents in five Mumbai neighborhoods shouted anti-government slogans and demanded an immediate cleanup. Some shielded themselves from the rain with plastic sheets, while others simply got drenched as they demonstrated outside civic offices.

"For so many days we have been lifting the bodies of the dead and now we are clearing animals from the roads. Is this our work?" asked a furious Hafeez Irani, his face covered with a handkerchief against the stench.
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