Basement car parks were always the most sought after and expensive. Those same basement car parks now resemble graveyards with thousands of vehicles lying dead.
Most of them cannot be moved at all, and insurance companies say it is better not to move them to be able to make a claim later.
Some that are in slightly better condition are flashing “SOS” on the display screen.
Many more cannot still be reached because they are submerged.
A Dover Lane resident’s Kia Seltos was under water up to its steering. A windowpane had automatically come down because even the car had a sinking feeling when the water level went up and up early on Tuesday morning.
Only the roof of a neighbour’s Mercedes-Benz showed above the water. Low-floor luxury vehicles were hit the hardest.
Water from the basement garage was pumped out by Wednesday night.
Many others across Ballygunge had pumps whirring even on Thursday.
An insurance company assessor said he had in the past two days inspected scores of vehicles that were beyond repair.
“In such a situation, it’s better not to move the car before an insurance assessment,” he said.
The count of such vehicles was beyond anybody’s estimate till Thursday night. Requests to tow cars away poured into workshops.
Kaushik Chakraborty, who lives in a five-storey building in Ballygunge Place, said the water in his parking lot had drained off on Thursday morning.
“But, unfortunately, my Honda City has become non-operational. The display unit is only flashing SOS,” Chakraborty said.
A out-of-order car abandoned on Camac Street in Kolkata on Tuesday.
Condominiums with multiple-tier basements suffered more. A Ballygunge resident said his parking lot had more than 50 immobile cars, “many of them Mercs and BMWs”. Some of the cars were completely under water.
At Udita, off EM Bypass, Munmun Mukherjee’s cars were “in wheel-deep water” for 30 hours. “My Volkswagen survived but the Maruti is in bad shape. We took it to the servicing centre. Half the things are non-operational now,” she said.
An IT professional who lives near Ballygunge Phari said: “All of us are now running around the insurance offices.”
More than 250mm of rain between Monday midnight and 5am on Tuesday flooded almost all of Calcutta. The rain, the highest in a single day since September 1986, killed at least 11 people.
All of Calcutta was hit, but the south took a heavier battering.
Many high-rise residents said that aside from the loss of lives, cars and elevators had borne the brunt. Several elevators at upscale Urbana, off the Ruby intersection, malfunctioned on Tuesday.
At Udita, the elevators were grounded even on Thursday evening. Initially, the power supply had been snapped because of the waterlogging. “The water was drained out on Thursday afternoon and power supply was restored, but the elevators are still not working,” an Udita resident said. “We have been told that water has seeped into the lifts (shafts) and it’s still dangerous to operate the lifts.”
At many complexes like Urbana, only one lift is working in each block.
Engineers said the problem gets compounded if water seeps into the lift shafts.
“It becomes extremely dangerous to operate a lift if there is water in the lift shaft. The water has to be removed at any cost. Else it can be hazardous,” an electrical engineer said.