CHENNAI - Heavy rain and storms paralysed life in southern India on Thursday, flooding roads, snapping power and phone lines and disrupting flights as the death toll due to the bad weather this month crossed 100.
Tamil Nadu state was the worst hit by the latest downpour as many areas in the capital Chennai were inundated and cut off, while people and vehicles waded through waist-high water in some parts of the city, witnesses said.
Strong winds uprooted trees and snapped power and phone links in some parts of the city.
"We seem to be passing from one disaster to another since the tsunami," state relief commissioner R. Santhanam told Reuters. Tamil Nadu took the brunt of the December's Indian Ocean tsunami on the Indian mainland.
"We have already evacuated about 50,000 people from the flooded low-lying areas in Chennai and its suburbs. Over 100,000 food packets have been distributed for lunch in the temporary shelters set up in community centres," he said.
Chennai city had received 27 cm (11 inches) of rain until early Thursday, he said.
Tamil Nadu and the neighbouring states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh have struggled to cope with torrential rain this month. More than 100 people have been killed in the three states, mostly in house collapses or due to electrocution.
At least 60 of those deaths occurred in Tamil Nadu, with four new deaths being reported over the last 24 hours, said R. Sivakumar, a senior government official.
Police in Karnataka said that seven people had died in the state capital Bangalore, India's technology hub, in accidents triggered by heavy rain and winds this week.
In Andhra Pradesh, the airport in the eastern port city of Visakhapatnam remained closed for the second week as the runway was under water, officials said.
At least 35 people have been killed in storms in the state over the past two weeks, they said.
Weather officials predicted more rains in the region over the next two days as a severe depression over the Bay of Bengal moved close to the Andhra Pradesh coast.
"Heavy to very heavy rainfall accompanied by squally winds with speeds of 55-65 km (35-40 miles) per hour in north Tamil Nadu and south Andhra Pradesh are expected," said S.R. Ramanan, director of a Chennai cyclone warning centre.
He said the seas would get very rough and fishermen had been told not to venture out. (Reporting by Bhagwan Singh in CHENNAI, Narayanan Madhavan in BANGALORE and S. Radha Kumar in HYDERABAD)
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