Locals pick up pieces after floods ravage Vijayawada

Vijayawada residents clean up after floods, facing significant losses, while sanitation workers clear garbage in flood-hit areas.

Vijayawada is limping back to normalcy, with many people beginning to clean and wash their houses. While milk stalls and kirana stores have yet to open in YSR Colony, those in Ajith Singh Nagar and other nearby colonies opened their shutters after nine days. Those who left for their relatives’ places last Tuesday realised the full extent of the damage only today.

Guru, who owns a ceiling material shop in Rythu Bazaar Road of Singh Nagar, returned on Monday, September 9, and opened the shop only to see his goods damaged. Guru was lamenting that goods worth ₹15 lakh had been destroyed. He hired a worker to wash the shop, which was filled with slush.

Men and women gathered near temples, shops, and street corners to inquire about losses incurred by others. Rajakumari Ravi, who owns a grocery shop, said she lost ₹2 lakh. A chai seller in the Daba Kotla Centre pegged his loss at ₹1 lakh, while an auto driver getting his vehicle repaired near the flyover said he would have to spend ₹30,000 on it.

There was a commotion in the streets as everyone got down to cleaning, washing, and decluttering. The garbage piled up in front of every house as people threw mattresses, clothes, sofa sets, and other materials that were dripping in water.

Around 6,000 sanitation workers, brought to the city from Visakhapatnam and other places, went from one road to another in flood-hit areas to clear the garbage. While some residents in Singh Nagar commended the staff for a quick job, others said the piled-up garbage was left on the roads, with no place to walk.

N. Rajesh, a resident of Rythu Bazaar Road, said he bought a few masks for himself and his family because the stink was unbearable and hoped that the workers would remove it immediately.

Even as the officials sounded an alert regarding the possible floods in Budameru rivulet due to heavy rain in catchment areas, the Singh Nagar flyover saw heavy traffic, as usual. Police personnel and rescue teams from the NDRF and SDRF, Organisation for Counter Terrorist Operations (OCTOPUS), continued maintaining a vigil.