Soon after the first of a series of devastating landslides hit the hilly Meppadi panchayat in Kerala’s Wayand at around 1 am Tuesday, Neethu Jojo woke up to water gushing into her house. At 1.30 am, she alerted Wayanad Institute of Medical Sciences (WIMS), Meppadi, after which the first rescue team was sent to the spot.
The rescuers, however, took hours to reach her area in Chooralmala village – one of the worst hit – as the roads were blocked by debris. By the time they reached, the next landslide had buried her.
On Saturday, her body was recovered and laid to rest.
Neethu worked as an executive at WIMS, which lost four members of its staff to the tragedy. A staffer at the hospital recalled her distress call: “We are in danger. There has been a landslide in Chooralmala. Water is gushing inside the house. Someone please come and save us,” Neethu had said.
The hospital quickly alerted fire and rescue services, and a team was soon dispatched to Chooralmala. As water started getting into more houses, rescuers started getting more calls, but the team that was already on its way found the going tough as it had to clear the road of uprooted trees, branches and other debris before it could proceed to the affected areas.
Meanwhile, at Neethu house – her husband Jojo Joseph, their five-year-old son, and her parents also lived there – several people in the neighbourhood gathered as they feared they may not be safe in their own homes.
With the rescuers yet to arrive and more muddy water gushing inside, Neethu made increasingly more frantic calls for help. At the same time, Jojo was planning to move the family and their neighbours up a hill to a safer spot.
Then, the second and more devastating landslide struck at around 4 am. Along with the gushing water came massive boulders that wreaked havoc in the village, and took with it a portion of Neethu’s house – the portion she was in.
Jojo managed to gather the family and some others in the village and head up the hill, but Neethu was nowhere to be found.
It was on Saturday that her body was dug up from the mud and debris. Her first call alerted rescuers and allowed them to get to the village earlier than they would have otherwise.
At WIMS, staffers mourned four of their own. Apart from Neethu, the hospital also lost nursing assistants Shafeena A M and Divya S, as well as engineering wing staff Bijesh R.
“We cannot still forget Neethu’s call for help,’’ said a staff member. Recalling the day of the landslide, she said, “It is a difficult time for our staff, who were dealing with the seriously injured persons admitted to our hospital. On the first day, we thought the members of staff caught in the landslides might survive with injuries. But not all of them did. They were familiar faces in the hospital.”
Click here to join The Indian Express on WhatsApp and get latest news and updates
[ad_2]
Source link
