Ooty: Heavy rains on Saturday night in Nilgiris resulted in uprooting of trees and power failure in many areas. While two persons have been injured, uprooted trees along the Coonoor-Burliar sector of the Ooty-NH paralyzed traffic for several hours last night.
The heavy summer showers this year which already wrecked havoc on the roadsides and triggering few minor landslips in the recent past, returned with fury on Saturday night, pounding the hills from around 11.30 pm till 2 am wee hours on Sunday.
The rains proved to be detrimental, especially in the Coonoor-Burliar sector of the busy Ooty-NH wherein the vehicular traffic increased manifold due to the flower show in Ooty.
The gusty winds accompanying the showers proved to devastating in the Coonoor-Burliar slopes, as about a dozen trees which were uprooted in the process and the branches of trees that got snapped and fell down on the NH hit vehicular traffic. An uprooted tree that fell on a car near Gandhipuram near Coonoor on Ooty-NH injured a Kerala woman tourist and also one Zakir, a resident of Coonoor.
The disaster management teams, which rushed the spots in the dark cover swung into action at fast pace to clear the uprooted trees and related rubble on the road. The rescue and relief teams cleared the mess around 5 am on Sunday early morning. Until then, many of the tourist vehicles and buses on the Ooty-NH continued to be stranded in the dark hours.
The wind-fallen trees on the Nilgiri Mountain Railway track delayed the NMR services by an hour.
Rrainfall recorded (in mm) in various places in Nilgiris on Sunday morning were as follows: Glenmorgan-75 mm, Ooty-57, Naduvattam-52, Gudalur and Kodanad-50, each, Coonoor-40, Kotagiri-35, Upper Bhavani-31, and Kallhatty-30.
