When debris came crushing: How rains and undisposed mud led to a disaster in Wayanad
A loud sound shook Palraj and Koodammal as the migrant Tamil couple in their forties stood waiting for a bus a few metres away from
A loud sound shook Palraj and Koodammal as the migrant Tamil couple in their forties stood waiting for a bus a few metres away from the Meenakshi bridge at Kalladi in Wayanad, Kerala, on the rainy morning of July 7. “The sound had come from atop a hill just behind us. A few minutes later, we heard another booming noise and a huge pile of mud and debris charged towards us,” Palraj, a plantation labourer hailing from Madurai in neighbouring, recalls a day later. The wave of mud crashed down the road, sweeping away the bridge and a tanker lorry parked along its way. As the heavy vehicle screeched to a halt a few seconds later after hitting a four-wheeler, Palraj and Koodammal found themselves under the lorry, stuck deep in mud. The couple were among the lucky few who escaped from a debris slide triggered by torrential monsoon rains near the portal of the under-construction Anakkampoyil-Kalladi-Meppadi twin-tube tunnel road between Wayanad and Kozhikode. “Some other labourers employed in the tunnel road project were also standing near the bus stop. We don’t know what happened to them,” says Koodammal, while nursing a wound on her wrist at a rescue camp set up at the Government Polytechnic College, Meppadi, hardly a kilometre away from the site of the incident. The Meenakshi bridge at Kalladi was covered with mud, and a mosque in the locality and a nearby house were destroyed after the incident. As the rescue and rehabilitation works are progressing, the residents in around half a dozen houses in the locality are yet to free themselves completely from fear. The soil excavated for the construction and related works had been dumped in large mounds near the yet-to-be-bored tunnel entrance at the foot of a rocky slope. Cement lining, about three inches thick and up to a height of 10 to 20 metre, had also been done on the land slope on both the left and right sides of a newly formed road that leads to the entrance. After the downpour, the rocky slope had given way along with the soil underneath. The sliding heap also carried soil from the forested area above the hill and construction debris and the excavated mud below. Though the construction work had been stopped in view of the monsoon in June, a few labourers and engineers were present there for monitoring purposes. Victims were migrants The rescue and search operations, carried out by teams from the Disaster Response Force, Kerala police, and the Fire and Rescue Services recovered the bodies of eight people — all of them migrants. The deceased are Chandra Bahn from Madhya Pradesh, Azharuddin Ansari from Uttar Pradesh, Mohammed Imran and Bikash Kumar Singh from Bihar, Anmol from Jharkhand, Rakesh Guchait from West Bengal, and Rahul Sharma and Bikram Singh Rana from Himachal Pradesh. All of them were employees of Dilip Buildcon Ltd., the company responsible for constructing the 8.73-km tunnel road. The execution of the project, the cost of which is estimated to be approximately ₹2,100 crore, is supervised by the State Public Works Department. It is being financed by the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board. Konkan Railway Corporation Limited, the special purpose vehicle for the project, is responsible for its execution and implementation. The initiative had got its final approval earlier this year and it is slated for completion within four years.
The BriefWire