Month after Wayanad landslides: Undelivered mails, police patrols to check thefts, selfie seekers

A post office littered with parcels of the dead and missing, a special police unit deployed to stop ‘selfie tourists’ and patrols to check thefts in abandoned houses is all that remains in the three Wayanad villages that were wiped off during the deadly landslides that occurred exactly a month ago.

An eight-km radius of Punchirimattam, Chooralmala and Mundakkai villages in the district was devastated by at least two massive landslides that hurtled down with ferocious volumes of water and debris around 2 am on July 30 claiming more than 231 lives even as 218 different human body parts have been found, as per latest official data.

The Kerala state highway no 39 leading to these picturesque villages of the hill district of Wayanad, over 470 kilometres from state capital Thiruvananthapuram, bear a testimony to the heart-wrenching tragedy as police vehicles, heavy earth movers, ambulances and rescue teams line up the stretch in anticipation of any emergency in view of the continuing downpour.

Houses — many damaged or partially crumbled and some intact — lay abandoned as the inhabitants have been moved by the government authorities to public shelters and rented houses, while a few others have shifted to the homes of their kin.

Some of the residents occasionally come to check on their houses with a hope to find their belongings that are buried under mounds of slush comprising huge rocks and tree trunks. The 10-day long rescue operations has now ended with slim chances of finding more survivors, a civil defence official stationed in the area said.

Shalini G, the in-charge post master of the Vellarmala post office in Chooralmala, keeps staring at the pile of parcels and packets that she is not able to get delivered since the facility got functional again on August 7.

Local postman Manikandan K showed PTI a parcel on Thursday that was addressed to a man living in Ajvad area which he will never be able to deliver.

“This man is dead. He was killed in the July 30 landslides. I knew him. There are more such parcels that we at this post office are not able to deliver for weeks now as the addressee is either dead or missing,” he said.

The anguish for Shalini’s husband Velayudhan PT, also a postmaster in the nearby Mundakkai village, is immense as every day he gets to know about more people whom he knew being reported dead. The couple’s 13-year-old, two-storeyed house in Chooralmala was damaged and rendered unliveable by the landslides.

“Me, my husband and son were sheer lucky to have escaped the disaster on the fateful night as it inundated our house till the first floor. We ran uphill and later got rescued,” Shalini says as she looks at the pile of undelivered and unclaimed parcels placed neatly on her table in the single-room post office.

The mud splattered houses of residents in the three villages, schools and other buildings reflect a frozen frame of catastrophe with hanging half-cut pillars, muck pushed right up to the bedrooms, bikes and four-wheelers buried under slush apart from utensils, sofa seats, chairs, tables, toys, school bags, clothes, toothbrushes lying strewn all over the place.

A contingent of the ‘Malabar Special Police’, a unit of Kerala Police tasked to undertake specialised law and order duties, along with the local cops, patrol these abandoned villages on foot to keep possible crimes at bay.

Officials say there were few incidents of theft being reported by the locals. There was a instance when Rs 4 lakh in cash was recovered from under the rubble. Hence, the police teams keep patrolling the area, a government official at the spot said.

At least four police pickets have been erected at the entry of the landslides-affected area in order to stop “selfie-seeking tourists” and curious onlookers who want to capture a slice of the disaster in their smartphones.

“Only the people who lived here are allowed to enter so that they can check on their houses. Tourists and other members of the public are not allowed in this area,” Inspector Rajitkumar M said.

Another policeman at the temporary police control room being run from a single-room house says people who prove their identity of being locals are only allowed to go inside along with their vehicle.

A revenue department team sitting at the ‘incident command centre’ is asked to check the credentials of those who claim they are locals but have lost their documents in the landslides, he said. Officials informed that a special camp was held here and most of the residents who lost their Aadhaar card, ration card, PAN card and other vital documents have been given duplicate copies.

A team of Kerala fire and rescue and the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) is also stationed in Chooralmala to keep an eye on the swollen rivulet that runs down from the hills into these villages.

A senior district administration official says large hectares of cardamom, coffee, pepper, tea, coconut, areca nut and banana plantations in the affected areas of the district have been completely damaged in the landslides which is the biggest such tragedy in the state.