NEW DELHI: Heavy rain in Delhi and Gurgaon led to flooded roads and traffic jams today, throwing morning schedules off gear. School children and their parents who were stranded for hours in flooded, jam-packed roads in Gurgaon were forced to turn back home. A few schools in Gurgaon have announced a holiday due to the bad weather.
Morning rush hour traffic was affected because of flooding of arterial roads, prompting the Delhi Traffic Police to put out alerts on Twitter. #DelhiRains was one of the top trends on Twitter this morning. Pictures on social media showed cars and bikes driving through flooded roads.
The traffic towards the busy Delhi-Jaipur-Mumbai highway was also disrupted. “Our team is trying to make the traffic movement smoother,” Gurgaon Assistant Commissioner of Police Heera Singh told. People waded through almost knee-deep water in Gurgaon’s Hero Honda Chowk.
Delhi Metro services on certain lines too were running late due to over-crowding.
This morning, heavy rain and lightning were reported near the Delhi airport, central Delhi and RK Puram. The sudden spell of rain meant muggy weather in the National Capital Region, with the humidity level in Delhi at 100 per cent at 8.30 am. Thunderstorm between 3 am and 4 am led to uprooting of trees, power cuts and water logging in many neighborhoods.
The temperature in Delhi on Monday was around 33 degrees while today, it was around 26 degrees at 7 am.
Monsoon had arrived in Delhi on June 28, a day before its scheduled date. The capital has been getting light to moderate rain this month.
The weather office had predicted heavy rain in parts of Uttarakhand, Haryana, Chandigarh, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, east Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region, sub-Himalayan West Bengal, Sikkim, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Konkan coast, Goa, Telangana and coastal Karnataka on Tuesday.