Chennai Rains: How Twitter users are constantly updating, dispelling rumours

Twitter is constantly providing weather updates and at the same time dispelling rumours to avoid panic among the residents of Chennai.

Chennai, Oct 31: Rains mean celebrations. Unfortunately, times have changed. We have stopped enjoying the big monsoon spell. In fact, we don't enjoy any season anymore.

As every time rain visits any of the big cities--be it Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata and Hyderabad--apprehension of waterlogging, traffic snarls, muddy roads, to name a few negatives associated with 'modern' day rainfall, haunts us.

On Monday, when Chennai received heavy rainfall, the story was no different as several areas were mildly flooded causing massive traffic jams in busy thoroughfares of the city. Along with Chennai, Tamil Nadu's coastal areas too received rainfall.

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) predicted heavy to very heavy rainfall in Chennai and at least eight other coastal districts in Tamil Nadu over the next 24 hours, which means Tuesday is also going to be a wet day for the southern state.

In order to save students from the usual "horrors" associated with rains, district administration in Chennai and Kancheepuram have declared holiday for all schools and colleges on Tuesday.

The rains have been caused by the cyclonic circulation which is currently prevailing over the Southwest Bay of Bengal off the Sri Lankan coast and the Tamil Nadu coast, Skymet Weather reported. Within 24 hours on Monday, the Nungambakkam observatory recorded 20 mm rainfall in Chennai, added Skymet Weather.

Papanasam in Tirunelveli district received 5 cm rainfall, while Mylaudy and Kuzhithirai areas in Kanyakumar districts received 5 cm and 4 cm rainfall respectively, PTI reported.

Now, as heartbeats of several faint-hearted and the curious ones have increased, worrying trouble due to rains, it's social media, especially the micro-blogging site, Twitter, that is constantly providing weather updates and at the same time dispelling rumours to avoid panic among the residents of Chennai.

Chennai, as we have seen during the 2015 floods, has a strong presence of social media warriors who came to the rescue of thousands of people.

Thus since Monday, the hashtag--#ChennaiRains--remained one of the top trends.

Here we bring you some tweets from accounts which are dedicatedly involved in disseminating information on Chennai rains:

The account, @chennaiweather, tweets everything related to Chennai Weather. "Wants to know about Chennai Weather? You can email me your queries to [email protected]," reads the bio of the account.

Then the twitter account, @ChennaiRains, is "an independent weather blogging community from Chennai." "Providing weather updates for events influencing Chennai & South India," reads the account's bio.

The bio of the account @praddy06 reads, "I am not doing this full time, so my updates will be mostly during non-office hours. In the days of heavy rains, I break this self-imposed rule."

OneIndia News