Wayanad landslide toll rises to six; search on for two missing

Wayanad (Kerala), Jul 9 (PTI) The death toll in the Wayanad landslide rose to six on Thursday with the recovery of three more bodies from the disaster site, district officials said. Search operations continued for the two persons still missing in the incident. The three bodies recovered have been identified as those of migrant workers—Azharuddin Ansari, a surveyor from Uttar Pradesh; Rahul Sharma, an engineer from Himachal Pradesh; and Mohammed Imran, an excavator operator from Bihar, the officials said. The two persons still missing are Rakesh Guchait, a surveyor from West Bengal, and Vikram Rana, a construction manager from Himachal Pradesh. Kerala Ministers A P Anil Kumar and T Siddique, who have camped in the area to coordinate the search operations, told reporters that one body was recovered from Zone 1 of the search area in the morning and the other two from Zone 3 near the river. “Searches will be carried out in Zones 1 and 2 of the area. We will also focus the search operations near the river,” Anil Kumar said. Siddique said that postmortems on the bodies would be conducted at Vythiri Taluk Hospital and that they would be embalmed at the Kozhikode Government Medical College Hospital before being sent to their respective home states. The district administration said that a 70-member team of the National Disaster Response Force, 110 Fire and Rescue Services personnel, and about 100 police officers were part of the search operation, in which 12 pieces of heavy earth-moving machinery, such as Hitachi excavators and JCB machines, were also being used. The district administration also said that 57 families living in vulnerable areas had been relocated to two relief camps at Meppadi Polytechnic College and the Government UP School in Cheeral village. A landslide occurred on July 7 at the site of the Anakkompoyil–Meppadi tunnel project, which is intended to connect Wayanad and Kozhikode districts. Chief Minister V D Satheesan had said on Wednesday that the search operations would be given priority. He had also said that, of the 10 persons injured in the incident, three had been discharged, four were still hospitalised but stable, and three others were in the ICU, of whom two were critical. PTI HMP SSK