I’ve always loved beaches and have lived near them for most of my life. It is perhaps why I have seen the impact of climate change on the city that I have grown in and loved so closely.
When I was a kid, I lived only a couple of minutes away from the Thiruvanmiyur beach in Chennai. Being the beach kid that I was, I would go to the beach frequently with my friends.
My first experience of the dangers of a changing climate was in December 2004.
I had just turned 5 years old and had gone to Bangalore for my birthday. After the cake cutting, we sat down to watch some television. My uncle was shuffling through channels and stopped at a news channel. I didn’t particularly like the fact that my entertainment had been compromised, but got to know that there was a Tsunami and it was apparently one of the longest and largest earthquakes the world had ever witnessed.
I soon became worried about my family and friends as a lot of us lived a few minutes away from the beach. And while they turned out to be safe, I was a little bummed out because my friends were boasting about how they “survived” the tsunami.
The Tsunami was caused by an earthquake of 9.1 magnitude near Sumatra, Indonesia. It affected multiple countries, including India, and is still one of the world’s worst disasters ever recorded killing more than 2 lakh people. Although climate change doesn’t cause these disasters, it can make the effects of the disasters much worse. The rising sea levels can increase the flooding after tsunamis further inland.
I moved out of there to Adyar, now living 10 minutes away from the Besant Nagar beach. After close to about 10 years, I decided to visit the Thiruvanmiyur beach and was shocked. I couldn’t believe that it was the beach. It was not the beach I played with my friends. The sea has come so close to the land that there is almost no beach now. I was in disbelief and immediately resorted to Google. An article introduced me to climate change and the rising sea levels. I was angry that these words were eating up my beaches.
It was November 2015. There was heavy rainfall. I loved the climate, especially because Chennai is always so hot. Heavy rains also meant holidays because schools and colleges usually get cancelled. We had gotten our exams postponed as well. Overall, I was extremely happy. The happiness was short-lived because I had drastically underestimated the intensity and the duration of the rains. It didn’t seem to stop.
My house slowly started flooding, water seeped from the ground onto our floor. We didn’t know what to do and we immediately used our old clothes to wipe the water off the floor. As the water inflow started increasing, we got waterproof cement and tried to apply the cement wherever water seeped through. We could only contain it so much. Usually, they stop the electricity during rains to avoid electrocution. So, there was no power as well.
In the few hours of electricity that we got, we quickly charged our phones and watched the news. One of the channels said that this was the heaviest rainfall recorded since 1918. We had to stay a night away from our house because of the flooding. We came back the next morning and spent the next few days cleaning the house. Over time, we learned the gravity of the floods. Hundreds of people were dead and thousands were displaced.
The government’s poor planning and disaster response resulted in much of the relief efforts being carried out by volunteers. On the second of December, Chennai was declared a disaster area. The Hindu for the first time since inception didn’t publish a print edition on that day. 2015 has almost become synonymous with the floods at this point.
The next year came Vardah, a cyclone. We were constantly watching the news hoping there would be no prediction of heavy rainfalls. This was not as bad in terms of flooding, but the heavy winds killed over 15 people, damaged thousands of transformers, and uprooted lakhs of trees. As Vardah crossed the sea, Chennai breathed a sigh of relief.
Some of the primary reasons for the city flooding are too few storms drains and the increasing encroachment of lakes and water bodies. A report from 2015 states that Chennai has only 855 km of stormwater drains against the 2847 km of urban roads, which is inadequate. Unplanned urbanization led to the shrinking of water bodies. The Pallikaranai wetlands shrunk from 15,000 acres in 1954 to 1,500 acres in 2016. Having lived in the city for a major part of my life, I have witnessed firsthand the effect of these developments on people.
A vulnerability assessment done by the Council on Energy, Environment, and Water (CEEW) ranked Chennai in 7th place as one of the most vulnerable districts in India. On the 26th of October, 2021, a study report called the Mapping India’s Climate Vulnerability ranked states based on a Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI), in which Tamil Nadu was ranked 12th. Over time, Chennai has become a hotspot for floods and cyclones.
I was listening to How To Save a Planet, a podcast by Gimlet. In one of the episodes called Unnatural Disasters, the hosts were talking about a “disaster” bag – a bag with all essentials that one would use in case of a (un?)natural disaster. The guest in that episode carried a disaster bag because of the increasing hurricanes where she lived and she listed out all the things in her bag. The thought of choosing the most essential things seemed tedious to me at that time ( not to mention depressing), so I took a rain check on it then.
2021 hasn’t been a very good year for Chennai. In Early November, Chennai witnessed another cyclone that caused heavy rains. It was like watching the same things repeat themselves. Water seeped in overnight into our house, so we tried taking the water out. After the rain subsided, we spent the next couple of days cleaning the house and watching the news. It was the heaviest rainfall since the one from 2015. Chennai received a 26% surplus rain from October 1 to November 7. For precaution, my mom asked me to take all my important documents and keep them safe. I wish I’d had the “disaster” bag. We now clearly have a use for it.
This time, in the news, apart from the usual rain statistics, I also looked at the lake encroachment statistics with more light on why this is happening rather than just what is happening. There were also protests demanding accountability and action. People from Ramdas Nagar, an area in Chennai were protesting against the water stagnation area and requested the officials to remove the water from the area.
Even as I was writing this piece, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) had issued a red alert to Chennai for the next two days.
Gone were the days where dipping my feet in the water reminded me of the beach. It reminds me of the dreaded floods now.