The death toll in Tuesday morning’s landslides and flash floods in Mundakkai village in Kerala’s Wayanad district touched the 340 mark by Friday 6 PM. Efforts are on to locate the missing persons trapped in the mounds of boulders, trees, clay and rocks as the engineers of Indian Army could trace signals from underneath the debris. Thermal Imaging Radars and Scanners have been put into service and the engineers were hopeful of finding living human beings from the slushy regions in the district. Major Seetha Ashok Shilke, an engineer who led the Madras Sappers of the Indian Army in laying the Bailey Bridge has emerged as the “star of Wayanad”.
This has rekindled hope among the survivors whose spirits were dampened by the statement made by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan that there was no possibility of any survivors in the landslides at Mundakkai.
Round the clock rescue and relief operations under the leadership of Indian Army and the experts of the National Disaster Response Team along the district. The laying of the Bailey Bridge in record time has hastened up the rescue missions as most of the areas were cut off from the mainland. Major Seetha Ashok Shelke of the Indian Army has become the heroin of the army operations in Wayanad as she was the one who led the 250-strong engineers in laying the Bailey Bridge that helped in resuming the rescue operations in the landslide affected areas.
Pinarayi Vijayan has written to global comity of nations to donate generously to meet the expenses for rescuing and rehabilitating the victims of the deluge and landslides. Meanwhile, the Government of Kerala, in a major faux pas asked its scientific community, especially those working in the fields of environment and earth science not to speak to the media and not to visit the landslide affected areas. Later, the chief secretary of the State by a special order got the directive withdrawn. The chief minister himself had told the media on Tuesday evening not to give any credence to the Madhav Gadgil headed expert group’s findings on Western Ghats.