A day after the death of a 23-year-old woman during heavy rainfall in Bengaluru, the city civic body admitted that it had not carried out safety audits for underpasses in intense rainfall situations, The Indian Express reported on Tuesday.

The woman, 23-year-old Batalu Bhanurekha was an employee of tech giant Infosys. She drowned to death after her car was submerged in an underpass in the KR Circle area.

The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike will now carry out safety audits of 18 underpasses in the city.

The city civic body’s Special Commissioner (Projects) Ravindra PN said that the drainage system often gets clogged with sticks, waste, and plastic items, which leads to the accumulation of water. “We have conducted safety audits in underpasses for various technical reasons, but not for assessing safety during rainfall situations,” he told the newspaper.

The civic body will now identify flood-prone underpasses in the city and barricade them during rainfall.

Commenting on the flooding in the KR Circle area, Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike chief Tushar Giri Nath said that the locality received 40 millimetres of rainfall in a short span of time. “No underpass can take that much water if rainwater from surrounding areas also enters the same drainage system,” he said, according to The Indian Express.

Another body recovered from storm water drain

The police on Monday recovered the body of a 31-year-old man who reportedly died after falling into an open stormwater drain, the Hindustan Times reported.

The man, Lokesh, worked as a housekeeping staff member at a company. He was found after a search operation that lasted for an hour and a half.

“Local residents had warned the man against walking on the waterlogged road, but he did not pay heed to them... he wanted to check the depth of water and fell into the drain in the process,” the newspaper quoted a police inspector at the KP Agrahara police station as saying. “We suspect Lokesh was in an inebriated state.”