For Kerala, a pattern has emerged with deadly clarity, with the first half of August proving catastrophic for the third consecutive year. On August 7, Kerala was struck by twin tragedies. A killer landslide triggered by non-stop rains snuffed out 71 lives (43 bodies were recovered by August 9, and 28 are still missing) in Pettimudy, near popular hill station Munnar, in a flash. The same evening was the tragic crash of Air India Express Dubai-Kozhikode Flight IX1344 at the Calicut International Airport, at Karipur, in Malappuram in north Kerala.
At Karipur, 18 died, including two pilots. Out of 190 passengers, many of them were returning after losing a job and desperate to reach home seeking safety from a pandemic that shows no signs of retreating.
At both Pettimudy and Karipur the local people rushed to the immediate rescue of victims, ignoring the COVID-19 protocol of wearing mask while stepping outside. Some school teachers, state transport drivers and police officers assigned to supervise the quarantine of the air passengers turned rescue workers without hesitation.
The jury is still out on if it was better to go for landing at Karipur, with a tailwind or a headwind, given poor visibility and evident waterlogging of the runway. Having retrieved both the digital flight data recorder (black box) and the cockpit voice recorder, the Civil Aviation Ministry’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau should be in a position to shed more light in the coming days.
Meanwhile, the rains showed no signs of let up, slowing down all efforts to retrieve dead bodies at Pettimudy, even as parts of the state hitherto deemed ‘safe’ started getting marooned by floodwater. These could not have come at a worse time for the state, having done a commendable job in the initial months of the COVID-19 outbreak, projecting a model for rest of the world. Even now, things are largely under control, though it is distracted by a handful of allegations, enough to cast a shadow of doubt over the image of the Pinarayi Vijayan-led Left government.
Arguably, there is very little a government can do when faced with nature’s fury. However, when the meteorology platforms provide efficient early warning systems, doubts emerge about the level of efficiency and a lack of standard operating procedures.
Soon after the 2018 floods, when questions were raised about the illogical opening of the sluice gates of a number of uphill major dams leading to widespread flooding downstream, it was blamed on the unexpected cloudburst. A year later, in August 2019, the state witnessed almost a frame-for-frame rerun, of dams brimming over and angry rivers in spate. Both floods resulted in large scale evacuation, of tens of thousands of families confined to relief camps for weeks, capped off by erratic compensation to victims.
Since then, two full years have passed and the state is reeling under the impact of Flood 3.0. The ill-conceived clearances to buildings, stone quarries in ecologically fragile zones and river-bed encroachments continue unabated as the government appears only keen to settle for the watered down version of Madhav Gadgil panel’s recommendations on protecting the Western Ghats ecology. It is too busy to sign up experts or consultancies to put in place mitigation measures for the inevitable flood.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led state government, reeling from poor treasury management for months and of late visibly struggling to come out of the shadow of many acts of omission and commission, may feel it has got the short end of the stick. However, the State has itself to blame for dragging its feet over the ‘Rebuild Kerala Initiative’, envisaged in August 2018 to reconstruct the flood-ravaged state.
With less than a year to go in power and a good two years of discussions, it took till July to sign on KPMG for project management support services to rebuild Kerala.
In short, it’s raining miseries on Kerala. If in the beginning it managed to control the pandemic, now it seems to be losing momentum in the fight against the virus. The flooding appears to be a repeat of what happened in 2018 and 2019 — and it seems that the government has not learnt from its past mistakes. The Karipur tragedy adds to the woes the state is facing. Kerala is facing a triple whammy.
The state tourism department will be in no hurry to run its ‘God’s Own Country’ tagline anytime soon. As it treads the perilous path from Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained, Kerala cannot wait till hell freezes over.
Vinod Mathew is a senior journalist based in Kochi. Views are personal.
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