A man, holding an umbrella, walks unsuspiciously on a road in Kottakkunnu, Malappuram. Heavy rains in Kerala have most troubled the districts of Malappuram and Wayanad in the last two days but the man with the umbrella would not have thought his life would change in a moment. CCTV visuals show him talk to an older woman on the way – later understood to have been his mother – as they both look behind them and see a mudslide emerge out of nowhere. They run for their lives, but she fades into the falling mud and trees uprooted along the way while he, swept off, somehow manages to reach the corner of a building. The man has apparently escaped, but his mother – the woman in the video, his wife and toddler child, who were still inside their home just a road below, were all trapped under the mudslide.
“We have received the complaint that Sarojini (the man’s mother), Geethu (wife) and a one-and-a-half-year-old child are missing in Kottakkunnu in Malappuram,” says a policeman from the Malappuram Janamaithri station. The DySP adds that the three missing people are likely to have died in the mud slide. The incident took place at around 1 pm on Friday and though rescue operations are being conducted in the area, till Friday night, nobody has been found yet.
In the visual, which has been released with the comments of someone watching it, the man can be seen walking towards the camera. Sarojini walks towards him calmly, unaware of what’s to come, and says something. But the person commenting on the video says she is telling him to run. Both mother and son see the mudslide, but it is too late for the woman to make a dash for it.
This is from Malappuram in Kerala. Scary visuals. A man and his mother try to run away as a landslide happens. She gets stuck. His son and wife were inside the house and could not rush out. #KeralaFloods2019 pic.twitter.com/obeiFh0tuu
— Dhanya Rajendran (@dhanyarajendran) August 9, 2019
In the last three days, at least 28 people have died in rain-related incidents across the state. From Malappuram alone, nine dead bodies have been recovered. It is feared that around 40 people are trapped underneath the remains of the Bhoothathan-Muthappan mountain, that collapsed in a landslide in Nilambur, Malappuram.