Mamata Banerjee stayed up at Nabanna on Sunday night to track the flood havoc in Bengal but home wouldn't have been far from her mind.
Spring tide in the Hooghly swamped Kalighat, including parts of Mamata's Harish Chatterjee Street neighbourhood, for the second time on Sunday from around 11.35pm. The floodwaters didn't start receding until 3.30am, a Calcutta Port Trust official said.
The only dry patch during the flooding was a 30-metre stretch in front of the chief minister's house at 30B Harish Chatterjee Street, behind which flows Tolly's Nullah.
While Mamata was at Nabanna, across the river, the mayoral council member in charge of drainage in the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, Tarak Singh, led a team of officials to her neighbourhood soon after the flooding started.
"The CMC contingent went straight to the ghat. Tolly's Nullah was overflowing by then and the engineers realised that they could do little to stem the tide," an official said.
Mamata's home stretch escaped the midnight flooding apparently because of a wall along the periphery of the lane, facing Tolly's Nullah.
The wall had been built after Mamata became chief minister to barricade the river.
Water from Tolly's Nullah does spill over and fill the ground in front of the chief minister's residence sometimes but the flooding is nothing compared to what some adjacent houses have to contend with during heavy rain and higher than normal tide.
Tolly's Nullah, also called Adi Ganga, runs 15.5km from Kidderpore to Garia. The canal, to which rainwater flows from several parts of south Calcutta, meets the Hooghly in Kidderpore. Surplus rainfall in south Bengal this monsoon and spring tide have combined to raise the water level of the Hooghly.
In Kalighat, the bed of Tolly's Nullah is higher than at other places because of silt. This is one of the reasons why it has overflowed thrice in less than a week, flooding the neighbourhood.
The possibility of river water spilling over during spring tide had prompted mayor Sovan Chatterjee to leave his nephew's wedding reception around 10pm and go to his office in the CMC headquarters on Sunday night. He stayed there until 2am.
"I thought parts of Calcutta would be inundated again during spring tide at night. I was in my office to monitor the situation," mayor Chatterjee said.
High tide occurs twice a day. Spring tide is high tide around the new moon and full moon.
A visit to Harish Chatterjee Street on Monday afternoon revealed that the stretch in front of the chief minister's residence is about two inches higher than the rest of the road on either side. This explains why that portion of the road was dry while the rest of it wasn't.
Tolly's Nullah overflowed and flooded the road and some nearby shops on Monday too, although the water level was less than on Sunday night.
But Harish Chatterjee Street was still better off than the rest of Kalighat. There was chest-deep water on Kalighat Road. Sadananda Road was submerged too.
Biker dead
A 25-year-old biker was killed and a 21-year-old woman riding pillion injured after the two-wheeler skidded off the Kona Expressway near Batore More and was hit by a mini truck around 3pm on Monday. The duo have been identified as Nikunjo Dolakia, a resident of SP Mukherjee Road, and Sohini Chatri, said police. The driver of the mini truck fled after the accident.
