#HydFlashFloods: The Sad Story Of Taher

Throughout Thursday, the very next day the unusually heavy rain unleashed destruction on Hyderabad. A 60-Year-old Mohammad Abdul Taher Qureshi gets devastative heartbreaking news one after the other, which resulted in collapse with tears. Taher’s four family members who died shortly in the housing collapse, remaining four, including his 5 year old grandson, are missing at a time. The retired state transport corporation driver’s family world collapsed in just a single day.

The early morning, Taher was informed about the body of his Eight-year-old granddaughter Amera has been found near Falak Numa, a distance of 2km from their home in palace view colony Bandlaguda.
Following in the next few hours, the other swept three daughter-in-law bodies laid before him, and this devastating moment made Taher where he couldn’t hold himself back and broke down into unstoppable weepings.

Taher’s eight family members, including the dead and missing, were swept away in floodwaters that billows throughout the city which was hit by uninterrupted rain that began on Tuesday evening. The last moment Taher met all of them was around, 12.30 am – 1 am on Wednesday.

“It was a bit later, after midnight, we heard the loud sound of a wall collapsing and all nine of us, including my two grandchildren, rushed out of the house. Said Taher.

We were standing on the staircase, we noticed water all around us, and the flow was robust, which was dragging all the vehicles along. Suddenly, the stairs began to shake and decayed. As all of us fell into the raging water, my younger brother Saddam Qureshi had pushed me for the safety, and he flew away himself. It all just happened in the blink of an eye moment, and I lost all my eight members of my family,” Taher grieved.

Saddam, a 55year old, who is also a retired employee of the government, remained missing unto late on Thursday evening – as Taher’s two sons, Mohammed Abdul Wajeed Qureshi and Mohammed Abdul Wasay Qureshi, and his grandson Abdul Wahab, 5.

Wajeed works for the consultancy an outsourcing multinational Cap Gemini, Wasay has newly returned to India from Saudi Arabia, Irfan Qureshi, brothers cousin, said.

Wajeed’s wife, Farzana 24; Wasay’s wife, Dharaksha, was 30. The third woman whose body has been found nearby the other bodies.

Mailardevpally’s Police Station Inspector K Narasimha has said that “The several teams of the police and disaster management agencies are searching for those who are still missing. “We are still looking. They may have swept away considerably than we initially thought,” he added.

The extensive distress that dumped a record of 324 mm rain on Hyderabad over Tuesday and Wednesday has submerged several low-lying residential areas that continued underwater on till Thursday. In the regions where the water lowered, residents of the locality encountered thick layers of slush, slip and debris inside their homes.

“Majority of the areas that submerged in the city’s south zone are Muslim-dominated neighbourhoods where houses were built on water bodies. The entire housing communities went under 10-15 feet of rainwater as most of the houses were built on water bodies resulted in filling up and encroached. The streets became rivers as the rain hit,” said Amjed Ullah Khan, the former Corporator, who is involved in the relief and rescue works.

Hyderabad Police and National Disaster Response Force have rescued many people from the flooded places and shifted them to the community halls and shelters. In multiple areas, parked vehicles in the basement wholly submerged. “The Underground water storage tanks and sumps overflowed all over the city. We have informed people about rinsing them properly before they use it again. We are distributing chlorine tablets,” said the official of Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation.