Memories of landslides haunt Chooralmala residents

Maimoona shares her harrowing experience of surviving a landslide in Wayanad, losing 11 relatives in the disaster.

“The rumbling of the landslides and the loud cry of neighbours still echo in my ears,” says Maimoona, a Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme worker at Chooralmala in Wayanad. Mymoona has lost 11 relatives in the disaster. 

“I woke up hearing the cries of the children of my relatives near my house around 1 p.m. on July 30.  My husband, Abdul Azeez, alerted me to the gravity of the situation. Soon, I realised that the floor of the house was covered in slush. When the debris rose around my waist, I decided to move to the terrace and rang up my son in Kozhikode,” Maimoona, who is at a relief camp at SDLP School, says.

“Around 4 a.m., we heard another faint rumbling and gradually the noise became louder when it reached our house and I saw a mass of slush, huge rocks, and other objects touching the second floor of my house. It devastated many houses. The four members of my family, including my husband, daughter, and sister-in-law, stayed on the terrace till the rescue squads reached on July 31 morning.”

“We visited Chooralmala three days back and it was difficult to identify the area. In places where houses stood were heaps of slush and huge rocks,” she says.

Murugan and his wife, Shubhalakshmi, are awaiting the arrival of their son Sarath at a relief camp at SKMJ Lower Primary School. They had seen him last eight days ago. He had gone back to the landslide site to help his neighbours after taking his parents to a safe place. The condition of many in the relief camp is no different. 

Kamily Devi, a tea estate worker at Mundakki, reached the area around four years ago from Jharkhand. As many as five families were living with her in an estate lane. Of them, four members of the lane went missing in the disaster and the body of her neighbour, Phul Kumari, was recovered four days ago. “We will not get any job in our native place, hence, we are planning to live in Wayanad itself. All documents of ours were lost in the landslide and we don’t know how to recover them,” she says.

“As the name suggests our Aiswarya residential area on the banks of the Punnapuzha river, near Chooralmala, was an area of prosperity,” says Saritha Kishore, former president of the Kudumbashree Area Development Society at Chooralmala. As many as 15 houses were under the residents association.