Kerala health centre grapples with tragedy as bodies rushed in
There is now a morbid process in place. As policemen shout out instructions, ambulances scream into the compound every few minutes.
It is 3pm on Wednesday afternoon, and a voice ripples through the gathered crowd. “Move aside, there is an ambulance coming” says a policeman, shouting at the top of his voice. The gathered people, sombre but practiced, part quickly. The ambulancerushes into the single storey Family Health Centre in Meppadi, 13 kilometres away from the landslide-hit villages of Chooralmala in Wayanad district. For the past two days, the number of the dead have not stopped rising. And the ambulances keep on coming.
Two days after multiple landslides hit Chooralmala and Mandukkai in Kerala’s Wayanad, leaving at last count 194 people dead, it is this small FHC that has become the main centre to receive, identify and store bodies brought from the devastation struck villages, including from Pothukkallu, where around 30 bodies were fished out from the Chaliyar river further downstream.
There is now a morbid process in place. As policemen shout out instructions, ambulances scream into the compound every few minutes. Volunteers with stretchers take out bodies, shifting them to a hall where autopsies are conducted by doctors. The volume is far too high, and the arrangements are makeshift -- bedsheets are held up by volunteers as doctors conduct autopsies and beds are stacked next to each other. The bodies are then washed and wrapped in white cloth, and placed on half a dozen wooden desks under a giant black tarpaulin sheet where families wait, hoping that they will have the chance to identify the bodies.
Two days have passed, and there are very few still alive being brought in. The only succour left is that they can at least take their remains home.
Volunteers and doctors jot details of the deceased such as their gender, possible age-group, jewelry and identification marks. If they are then identified by the waiting families, mobile freezers and brought in and they are ferried to their native villages.
If there are no claimants, the bodies are shifted to a community hall turned mortuary, about a 100 metres away, to be stored for the next hours, or even days.
On Wednesday afternoon, one of the bodies that arrived was small and frail—a little girl, the notes supposing she is less than 10 years old. As families gathered around the wooden desk, volunteers in rain coats lifted the cloth to reveal her face. One woman murmured, “It’s not her.” Her face was covered again.
A little distance away from the community centre, Ratheesh and his friend stood patiently, waiting to receive word of the body of his 70-year-old paternal uncle Narendran, washed away by the landslide in Chooralmala. “We know he’s dead, but we haven’t found his body so far. We found my aunt’s body yesterday from near the house itself,” he said.
Right next to them, Sindhu, in her 40’s, and her husband went from one table to next, looking for her mother in law. They had heard her body was one of the thirty found in Pothakallu from the Chaliyar river, 30 kilometres away, and yet there was little word.
“We lived in Mundakkai while she lived alone in a house in Chooralmala. Our house luckily was untouched by the landslide and we were able to run to safety. But she was trapped in the house when the sludge and boulders hit the building,” said Sindhu.
Dr Ashika, a doctor from a private hospital in Kozhikode who has been deputed to the FHC to oversee the arrangements, told HT, “We are following a carefully-laid down protocol here. We are taking DNA samples from the bodies to help with identification. The bodies are in really bad shape. The process will only get tougher from here on.”