The heaviest monsoonal rains were late to arrive in Mumbai this year but were also particularly severe. India's financial capital has been hammered in recent weeks and water levels in some areas have risen by several feet. A huge effort is underway to evacuate numerous low-lying areas, but the going has been slow.
The deluge brought down
a four-storey building on Thursday, killing at least 33 people. Rescue workers used mechanical diggers through the night to sift through the wreckage of the 117-year-old structure in Mumbai's crowded Bhendi Bazaar area. There have also been at least 10 more lives lost due to the floods in Mumbai.
Across India at least 30 million people have been affected by weeks of downpour. Readers will remember that a fortnight ago we wrote about the scale of damage in India's downtrodden Bihar state. Fortunately, the embankments protecting Bihar's floodplains continue to hold. Despite that,
more than 500 people have already lost their lives. Train lines and highways in Bihar have been washed away, isolating the northeastern territories from the rest of India. And still the violently overflowing Brahmaputra river continues to wreak havoc.
Further downstream the riverine marshes and deltas of Bangladesh
remain completely inundated. At best guess some 10,000 hectares of farmland have been lost and another 60,000 have been damaged. But until the floodwaters recede it's impossible to know just how bad the damage is.
The tremendous blow is one that Bangladesh can scarcely withstand. The nation's farmers were already playing catch up before the monsoon struck; flash floods in April had wiped out an estimated one million tonnes of rice stock. Bangladesh is no newcomer to flooding, but this year's scale and intensity makes 2017 the worst year it has had in the last thirty.
Back in the States, a street-by-street search is underway across greater Houston as the tropical storm formerly known as Hurricane Harvey now dumps rain across neighbouring Louisiana.
Texas has been pummelled for the past week by a truly unique weather event as Harvey escalated from a Category 1 to a Category 4 hurricane in less than a day. It dumped so much rain on Texas that Houston eventually became an extension of the Gulf of Mexico. The hurricane essentially started to feed itself.
The cleanup costs will undoubtedly come in at tens, if not hundreds, of billions.
45 people are known to have died and that toll too will rise. Worryingly, Houston is also home to a large number of America's refineries, chemical manufacturers, and 75% of US production of Ethylene -
the world's most important chemical. At
Arkema Inc.'s chemical plant 6-foot-deep floodwaters led to a series of explosions. Now noxious fumes and the disruption of manufacturing across the world are two more concerns to add to that list.
And that's not it for bad weather. Over the past two days
Hurricane Irma has been intensifying rapidly over the Atlantic. It is now classified as a Category 3 hurricane and is likely to strengthen even further as it heads towards the Caribbean islands and the US in the coming week.
We're still not done. In the West Africa nation of Niger at least 40 people have perished this rainy season. The capital Niamey has been particularly hard hit and hundreds of homes along the River Niger have been washed away. Dirt roads have been turned into vast mud pools rendering vehicle transport highly difficult. It's a grim reminder of last year's deadly flash-floods. In May the United Nations warned that as many as 100,000 were at risk of serious danger as the wet season approached.
For anyone who doesn't think our climate is changing these events must pose a truly remarkable coincidence.
