The upper portion of a tree falls on several vehicles in a residential area.

PUNE: A 54-year-old driver of a PMPML service van died after a huge tree fell on the vehicle in front of Grahak Peth on the busy Tilak road on Wednesday evening. An intense spell of rain for around half-an-hour from 6.05pm threw normal life out of gear across the city.

Senior inspector Dadasaheb Chudappa of the Vishrambaug police station said the driver, Vijay Navghane, a resident of Dhankawadi, had reached the spot around 7pm with another PMPML staffer to attend to a bus which had broken down while on the way to Swargate.

Navghane stayed in the van while his colleague walked towards the bus. Around that time, the tree fell on the van, trapping Navghane inside, police said.

"We had to summon a crane from the Pune Metro rail works at Swargate to remove the tree," Pune fire brigade's chief officer Prashant Ranpise said. The incident caused a major traffic jam on the road and its bylanes.

Traffic crawled on several other roads too because of waterlogging and falling of trees. The fire brigade received more than 70 distress calls, mostly related to fallen trees and heavy waterlogging.

The IMD's Shivajinagar observatory recorded 20.9mm rain for three hours between 5.30pm and 8.30pm, which the weathermen described as "intense" and "damaging". Almost all of the rain was during a short span of 30 minutes.

Evening squall brings down several trees, halts traffic

An intense spell of rain for around half-an-hour from 6.05pm on Wednesday threw normal life out of gear across the city.

The fire brigade received more than 70 distress calls, mostly related to falling of trees and heavy waterlogging at localities in Kothrud, Erandwane, Karvenagar, Prabhat Road, Bhandarkar Road, Sahakarnagar, Dandekar bridge, Guruwar Peth and Ganesh Peth, among others. “At many places tree branches had fallen on vehicles,” said Prashant Ranpise, the Pune fire brigade’s chief officer.

A student of SNDT Women’s College on Karve Road suffered leg injury when a tree fell on her while she was rushing to her hostel room on the college campus. Power supply of housing societies on Bhandarkar Road was disrupted following a tree falling on an overhead wire.

The heavy downpour caused traffic jam along the main thoroughfares, including JM Road, Fergusson College Road, Karve Road and Sinhagad Road. Traffic had to be suspended on certain stretches of Sinhagad Road because of heavy waterlogging after a huge tree fell near Santosh Hall chowk. The vehicular movement on Mumbai-Bengaluru highway was slow because of waterlogging at Chandni Chowk.

The IMD’s Shivajinagar observatory recorded 20.9mm rain in three hours between 5.30pm and 8.30pm on Wednesday. “Almost all the 20.9mm rain was during a short span of half-an-hour. This was the highest rain in Shivajinagar in a 24-hour period this month. The Wednesday evening rain data for Lohegaon and Pashan would be released on Thursday morning,” an IMD official said.

Weathermen described the Wednesday evening’s downpour as “intense and damaging”. Any incidence of over 10mm rainfall in an hour is termed intense. “Thunder activity and moderate rain are very likely in the city till October 11,” the IMD official said.

IMD did not record any instance of hail, but some residents claimed that they saw pea-sized hail falling on Wednesday. Anupam Kashyapi, head of IMD’s weather forecasting unit, said, “The cumulonimbus cloud height on Wednesday was around 12km with core height around 7-8km, in which hail is not possible.”

It was raining nearly all of Wednesday morning, too. Lohegaon recorded a near-heavy rain spell with 66.2mm in 24 hours till 8.30am on Wednesday — the highest one-day rain in the area since October 1. Pashan recorded 50.3mm rain during this period, also the highest for October this year, while Shivajinagar recorded 10.2mm rain till Wednesday morning.

