Mumbai: Heavy rains and strong winds lashed Mumbai on Sunday, disrupting flight operations at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport and causing two fatalities in separate tree-collapse incidents.
Airport authorities suspended all runway operations for an hour, from 10.17 am to 11.17 am, after gusty winds of up to 42 knots and poor visibility made flying unsafe. Normal operations resumed after weather conditions improved.
Sources said four IndiGo flights were cancelled, while 13 incoming flights operated by various airlines were diverted to nearby airports before later returning to Mumbai. According to flight tracking website Flightradar24, around 90 per cent of departing flights were delayed by an average of 65 minutes, while 45 per cent of arrivals were delayed.
The cancelled IndiGo flights included Delhi-Mumbai (6E 395), Mumbai-Indore (6E 5273), Indore-Mumbai (6E 552) and Mumbai-Delhi (6E 6613). IndiGo advised passengers to check their flight status due to adverse weather conditions affecting operations in Mumbai and Delhi.
Meanwhile, rain-related incidents claimed two lives in the city. In Kurla West, a tree collapsed on a shop, killing senior citizen Yunus Kundawala. In another incident reported from Aarey Colony in Goregaon East, 18-year-old Kumar Hasan Raza Jahangir Alam Syed died after a tree branch fell on him while he was riding a motorcycle.
The latest fatalities come just days after an 11-year-old boy was killed when a tree fell on a moving school bus in Chembur on June 30, taking the death toll from tree-collapse incidents in Mumbai to three in less than a week.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: deccanchronicle.com
