Coast Guard flood rescue teams and helicopters have brought 170 people out of the floodwater across Daman, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and south Gujarat since the midnight of 22 July, the Indian Coast Guard said on Friday. The count covers eleven separate operations run alongside the local civil administration.

Eleven operations behind the Coast Guard flood rescue count

The first came on the night of 22 and 23 July at Khanvel in Silvassa, where five stranded people were taken out. Three fishermen followed, caught against a flooded riverbank in the Kadaiya coastal area.

What the service has described is not one set piece rescue. It is a rolling sequence, most of it after dark, much of it in places the roads had already stopped reaching. Disaster Relief Teams went in on foot through submerged ground where boats and vehicles could not get through, and helicopters took the locations they could not reach at all.


Sixty out of the Welspun industrial area

The largest single evacuation came on the night of 23 and 24 July at the Welspun industrial area, where road connectivity had been cut completely. Sixty people were brought out.

Seven were lifted from a bus stranded in floodwater near Aero Fibre Pvt Ltd. Ten came out of Dongri. Four were taken off by helicopter from the Valsad and Pardi belt. Another eight were rescued from the Reliance Industries area during overnight work.

A pregnant woman and a breathing case at Avadh Society

Ten people were rescued from the Avadh Society area. Two of them needed more than a lift to dry ground. One was a woman nine months pregnant. The other was in respiratory distress.

What the relief teams are built to do

Assistance during natural calamities sits in the Coast Guard's charter of duties next to its search and rescue obligations, and Disaster Relief Teams are held ready at stations along both seaboards for exactly this. Daman is a Coast Guard air station as well as a district, which is why Coast Guard flood rescue crews were working over the Union Territory within hours rather than days.

The service said it would continue to support the civil authorities and hold a high state of readiness for further emergencies arising from the flooding.

Its air arm is built around Dornier fixed wing aircraft and helicopters, a fleet sized for coastal work rather than for long duration watch. That gap is what the Defence Ministry moved on this month with a request for information for ten medium altitude long endurance remotely piloted aircraft for the aviation wing.

The wider south Gujarat response

The Coast Guard is one of several agencies working the same districts. Gujarat's State Emergency Operations Centre at Gandhinagar reported 38,653 people evacuated and 5,547 rescued across the monsoon season so far, with Army teams positioned in Ahmedabad, Navsari and Valsad, Air Force rescue work in Vadodara, and Coast Guard aerial surveys over Navsari, Valsad and Tapi. The National Disaster Response Force reported rescuing 56 people and moving 1,576 to safety, with more teams airlifted into the state.

This is the third flood the Indian military has been called into this month. The Army's Operation Jal Rahat in upper Assam put relief columns into Sivasagar, Jorhat and Charaideo. Before that, troops of the White Knight Corps pulled eleven civilians out of flash floods in Rajouri.

Two helicopters over Mendar village

On 24 July, two Coast Guard helicopters airlifted 33 people from Mendar village in Navsari district. It was the largest aerial evacuation of the sequence and the last one the service has accounted for.

One of the 33 was in severe chest pain. He was moved for medical attention on landing.