Flash floods in India have been a raging concern and you cannot deny the fact. From Mumbai experiencing highly water-logged streets that throw the city out of gear every year, to the damage caused in Assam since May, we literally have no control over the natural calamity. While Assam saw a massive 1 Lakh people displaced and affected, things crossed all limits with Kerala experiencing the worst floods in decades. The state has been ripped apart by the overflow of water leading to crushed houses, landslides, thousands losing their lives and the others moved to relief camps.
However, what leaves us in a dismal state is that the municipal corporation is not doing enough to cope up with these disasters.
For all of us to learn from, the city of Tokyo in Japan, has an incredible flood management system to deal with unprecedented floods.
In their bid to fight the forces of nature, Tokyo has spent billions of dollars in building a gigantic coordinated system of massive structures. Titled as the Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel, the underground complex is designed to channel out the excessive rainfall away from the metro area into underground shafts and eventually into rivers.
The cathedral-like chamber is five stories deep and is the length of two football fields. Yes, that how mighty the system is.
The objective of the colossal surge tank is to break the momentum of water as it comes down. It has been constructed in a way which will ensure that the tank never fills up and always discharges the water to the attached river.
Though the largest in the world, the tank is just the tail end of an astonishing flood management system that stretches another 6.3 kilometers underground. It connects five watercourses to the main river, bypassing a low line basin. In case of a flood, the overflow from each river drains into a series of five giant cylinders, which are connected to 6 kilometers of tunnels.
The cylinders are situated approximately 20 stories below and the whole thing looks like a submarine hatch. For a mind-boggling fact, a single one of these cylinders is enough to fit a space shuttle.
Just for these flood waters, Tokyo has built a new river underground, 50 meters below the city.
The four pumps in the tank, which can discharge 50 cubic meters per second, are the heart of the system and are powered by turbines modified from jet aircraft engines.
But this is just what is underground. The Arakawa river also has an artificial waterway constructed to control these unpredictable flood events. As the floods have increased, the size of the gates has been doubled with time. The discharge channel’s main purpose is to divert the flood waters from eastern Tokyo.
Watch this video to get a more detailed description:
Woah. This is definitely one of the engineering wonders of the world. It’s high time India came up with something similar for there is no dearth of talent in this country. Yes, it might take a hell lot of money to pull off such an equipped system, but it won’t be costlier than the lives lost due to floods every year, for sure.