Nearly 250 people are yet to be accounted for in rescue and search operations after the devastating landslide in Kerala’s Wayanad. The death toll had mounted to 341 by late on Saturday, said a report in Manoramaonline.
In an account, dearest to people witnessing the rescue operations, a survivor, Sujatha Aninanchira, narrated how she had a miraculous escape when her house was smashed under a boulder in the Chooralmala landslides.
She and her family climbed a nearby hill only to be faced by a herd of wild elephants. Known to have malicious behavior, elephants were not, this time, as tender. In the midst of it all, when she saw the tuskers in a report by Asianet News, Sujatha said that she pleaded before them for protection. At the end, the elephants are said to have protected the family until their rescue—a deed she cannot explain without divine intervention.
Sujatha, functional at the moment from Meppadi GHSS, said, “It was pitch dark and just half a metre away from us was a wild elephant. It too seemed frightened. I mumbled a request to the elephant, saying—I had just survived a disaster— and asked it to spare us to allow us to lie down for the night and let someone rescue us. “We were too close to the tusker’s legs, but it seemed to realize our problem. We stood there till 6 am and the elephants stood there seeing us till the people rescued us in the morning and I could see its eyes welling up as dawn broke.”
Describing the chaos, Sujatha said that the water was so high it looked like the sea, with trees floating. She had described the view of heavy floods destroying her neighbor’s two-story building and her own.
She said she heard her granddaughter cry amidst all the turmoil. She managed to pull the child from the debris, covered her with a cloth, and started swimming in the rising water. Her son, daughter-in-law, and grandson, who were in the nearby house, she said were rescued by her son. They walked through a coffee plantation, where they met the wild elephants.
Her family members were rescued from there and were provided with dry clothes, food, and water and were taken to a safe location from there. Sujatha said that most of the members in the community lost their lives in the floodwaters and landslides.