Dozens of families that witnessed the tragic landslip at Kavalappara in Pothukal panchayat near Nilambur on the night of August 8, 2019, observed the fifth anniversary of the disaster rather coldly on Thursday. They saw 59 people of their neighbourhood being buried alive when a large chunk of soil and rocks came tumbling down from Muthappankunnu around 8 p.m. During a search that lasted 19 days, only 48 bodies were recovered, and the remaining 11 were allowed to rest in peace under the 30 ft soil.
A disaster of quite larger proportions struck five years later at Vellarimala in Meppadi panchayat of Wayanad in the early hours of July 30, wiping out Chooralmala, Mundakkai and Punchirimattam settlements. The authorities are still grappling with the number of people who lost their lives in one of the largest landslide disasters in the country. Officially, 226 were dead and 138 were missing. Local people say the number of human lives claimed by the landslide could be around 500.
Arun Bhaskar, Director of Civil Defence Academy at Thrissur, who had supervised the 19-day search operation at Kavalappara and is on the frontline of the ongoing search at Chooralmala-Mundakkai, said both tragedies had several dissimilarities.
“The Chooralmala-Mundakkai tragedy is incomparable. Kavalappara was a typical landslide or landslip that buried a few acres under the Muthappankunnu. But the Chooralmala-Mundakkai disaster was a landslide coupled with a massive rockfall. The force of the debris was so heavy that it took a large number of victims as far as 40 km down into the Chaliyar,” said Mr. Bhaskar.
It took more than 15 hours for the world to come to know about the tragedy when the earth devoured 59 lives and destroyed 45 houses in Kavalappara. But the world knew about the Chooralmala-Mundakkai disaster within minutes after nature wreaked havoc on the settlements along the banks of the Iruvazhinjipuzha.
“Although we are using dozens of earth movers, it is almost impossible to move some of the giant rocks that have come down from that hill. The rocks are deeply entrenched. Many of them are best left untouched,” said Mr. Bhaskar.
In Kavalappara, the bodies retrieved were intact in spite of the natural decomposition from being under the soil. But in Chooralmala-Mundakkai, the victims were horrendously mutilated and disfigured. As many as 196 body parts were retrieved from different parts of Wayanad and Malappuram until Thursday evening.
Published - August 08, 2024 11:42 pm IST
