The Times of India       12.09.2014 

Clean-up operations start on warfooting

VADODARA: Health and sanitation departments have started work on a war footing to avoid any disease outbreak as Vadodara started recovering from the flood situation.

Vadodara Municipal Corporation (VMC) has started a sanitation drive. "Water level in almost every residential colony has receded. Our priority is to clean up all the main and arterial roads. We have deployed thousands of sanitation workers across the city who will be working round the clock," said municipal commissioner Manish Bharadwaj.

VMC has also brought in 300 sanitation workers from Ahmedabad and Surat to speed up the cleaning. The civic body has already removed 500 metric tonnes of garbage from the city in the last 24 hours.

Around 117 medical and paramedical teams started surveying and supplying precautionary medicines in the flood-hit areas on Thursday. While 21 medical teams from Vadodara Municipal Corporation (VMC) along with six teams from SSG Hospital covered the city, 90 teams from district health department surveyed Waghodia, Savli and Dabhoi talukas along with other rural areas.

"Our teams covered the entire district on Thursday and they will follow it up with another precautionary disinfecting drive on Friday," said VMC's medical officer Dr Devesh Patel.

The authorities have assigned one disinfectant fogging machine for each ward in the city along with 81 smaller machines to reach narrower lanes and inside homes. Community health centres and primary health centres (PHC) in the district started functioning on Thursday while Goraj PHC which was badly affected by the floods remained partially functional.

Four major hospitals of the city - SSG Hospital, Metro Hospital, Narhari General Hospital and Kashiba Children's Hospital - had become inaccessible on Wednesday. However, with water levels receding, they became accessible on Thursday.