© Kunal Patil/ Hindustan TimesA man pushes his bike through a waterlogged street in Mumbai on Tuesday evening.
Between Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, Mumbai received 303.7 mm, the second highest after the 318.2mm recorded on September 12, 1981Near-record rainfall left vast areas of
Mumbai under water on Wednesday, affecting suburban train services and flights and forcing authorities to shut down educational institutions for a day in the country's financial capital.
As many as 183 passengers had a narrow escape when a SpiceJet flight overshot a wet runway while landing at the Mumbai airport and got stuck in mud on Tuesday night, officials said. The passengers were safely evacuated but more than 50 flights had to be diverted as a result of the accident.
The latest flooding comes less than a month after the city of 20 million people was pummelled by unusually high rainfall that killed many and brought the metropolis to its knees for at least two days.
Between 8.30am Tuesday and 8.30am Wednesday, the Santacruz weather station, representative of Mumbai and its suburbs,
recorded 303.7mm, and Colaba, representative of south Mumbai, recorded 210mm rain, the highest for south Mumbai this monsoon.
The city was just 14.5mm short of the all-time high 24-hour September rainfall of 318.2mm recorded on September 12, 1981. The last days' rainfall was also the highest in a decade since the September 4, 2012 when the city received 185.3mm rain.
Mumbai's average rainfall for September is 312.3mm, which was surpassed over the past 24 hours.Met officials said the city has recorded 536.4mm in September. The total rainfall this season is at 2879.5mm as against the annual average of 2258mm.
Comment: Meanwhile officials are rushing to evacuate tens of thousands of people from their homes in western Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria inflicted structural damage on a dam and unleashed "extremely dangerous" flash floods.
Some 70,000 residents in the municipalities of Isabela and Quebradillas were being evacuated by bus after a crack appeared in the nearly 90-year old Guajataca dam.
"It's a structural failure. I don't have any more details," Governor Ricardo Rossello said from the capital, San Juan. "We're trying to evacuate as many people as possible."
"This is an EXTREMELY DANGEROUS SITUATION. Buses are currently evacuating people from the area as quickly as they can," the US National Weather Service tweeted on Friday .
In a later message, the NWS tweeted: "All Areas surrounding the Guajataca River should evacuate NOW. Their lives are in DANGER! Please SHARE!"
More than 15in (nearly 40cm) of rain has fallen on the mountains surrounding the Guajataca dam, swelling the reservoir behind the nearly 90-year-old dam, which holds back a manmade lake covering about two square miles (five square kilometres).