Sister’s home swept away with them inside: Wayanad survivor recounts

Wayanad: The once tranquil villages of Mundakkai and Chooralmala near Meppadi in Wayanad were surrounded by lush forest, but in the early hours of Tuesday what the surviving families of the massive landslides there witnessed was the unforgiving ferocity of nature’s destructive forces.

As many as 177 people have died and 200 have been injured in the massive landslides that hit Wayanad district two days ago, with the numbers expected to rise as rescuers continue to unearth bodies buried in the debris, the district administration said on Thursday.

The 177 dead include 25 children and 70 women. Survivors narrated the chilling experience etched into their memories forever. Talking to the media from a relief camp at Meppadi, an elderly woman, Sujatha, who worked at the tea estate there, narrated the astounding account of how she and her grandchild spent the night next to a wild tusker and remained unharmed by the animal as they watched everything she owned get destroyed by the landslide. “We barely escaped from our toppling house. We ran to a nearby hill at the edge of the forest. Once we reached there, we realised that we were standing next to a tusker,” Sujatha said.

She said she spoke to the wild elephant as she would to a human. “I told him (the elephant) that we lost everything and asked him not to attack us. We spent the entire night next to him,” she said.

Other survivors of the landslides, Sirajudeen and his family, bore witness to the unimaginable, watching helplessly as their home, including the means of his livelihood, an autorickshaw, crumbled beneath the weight of monstrous boulders.

Sirajudeen said he heard loud noises and water gushing past in the early hours of Tuesday. When they saw muddy water gushing into their home, they somehow scrambled to the higher ground behind their house. “We saw huge boulders and trees crushing everything we had. Our autorickshaw is completely destroyed,” the family, which was visibly shaken, said. Before the landslide, they felt the house shaking and the air filled up with the distinctive smell of uprooted vegetation and wet earth, they said.

Ganesh, who belongs to Chooralmala and works as a security guard, had come home late on Monday night. He lost his sister, her husband, her sister’s son and daughter-in-law, as well as her sister’s grandchildren. “As the water rose, we ran to the hilltop. We saw my sister’s house being washed away in the first landslide. The second landslide took away my house too,” he said, speaking of the horrors he witnessed.