Heavy rain, lightning kills 8 people in Jharkhand

Ranchi, Oct 2 (PTI) At least eight people were killed including one in Ranchi due to heavy rain and lightning strikes in Jharkhand in the last 24 hours, an official said on Monday.

Parts of Jharkhand have been receiving incessant rains since Saturday evening with several spells of heavy rains, which damaged several culverts, diversions and also claimed several lives.

A 28-year-old man fell in an overflowing drain in Hatma Saraitand in Ranchi’s Lalpur area on Sunday. The body of the person, identified as Dev Prasad alias Chotu, was recovered around 2.5 km away from the place of occurrence on Monday morning.

“The body of the person was recovered this morning and postmortem has also been carried out. He had fallen in an overflowing drain triggered by heavy rain on Sunday,” Gonda police station in-charge Ravi Thakur told PTI.

In Jhakhand’s Jamtara district, a woman and her three children, aged between one-and-a-half years and seven years, were killed in lightning strike on Sunday, police said. The incident happened at Chandadih Lakhanpur, Naryananpur police station in-charge Dilip Kumar told PTI.

A child died after a wall made of a mud house collapsed in Bokaro district, while two girls, aged nine and 12 years, drowned in a pond in Mayapur village in Palamu district, police said.

Several diversions and culverts also washed away in heavy rain. A diversion on NH-39 in Ranchi’s Ratu area was washed away due to incessant rain on Sunday night, which affected the traffic movement on the Ranchi-Daltonganj route. Water levels reached near the danger mark in several rivers of the state.

Even though rain intensity has decreased in the state capital Ranchi, the weather department has issued an orange alert for parts of Lohardaga, Gumla and Simdega, where heavy to very heavy rainfall might occur on Monday.

In-charge of Ranchi Meteorological Centre, Abhishek Anand said that widespread rainfall continued over Jharkhand under the influence of a low-pressure system. Parts of the state might be receiving rainfall till October 4, he said.