Indian diocese opens facilities as relief camps for landslide victims

By LiCAS News

The Calicut diocese called on the faithful to continue to pray for all the landslide-affected families and victims. “This is the time to serve the needy and the helpless,” it said on its website.

On July 30, massive landslides devastated Wayanad, Kerala, causing significant loss of life and property. Triggered by unprecedented rainfall, the landslides have claimed 270 lives so far, with around 378 people still missing.

The Commandant of the Para Regimental Training Centre stated that 500 to 600 personnel from the NDRF, Army, State Police, forest officials, and volunteers have been engaged in the rescue operations.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that at least 85 relief camps have been set up in the district, housing 8,577 people. This includes 1,822 individuals in Chooralmala alone, distributed across nine camps.

District authorities in Wayanad have begun collecting data to determine the number of missing persons following the massive tragedy. Rescue operations have resumed to locate individuals suspected to be trapped.

Indian rescue crews scoured mud-caked tea plantations and villages Thursday with little hope of finding more survivors from successive landslides, according to a report by Agence France-Presse.

Days of torrential monsoon rains have battered the southern coastal state of Kerala, with blocked roads into the Wayanad district disaster area complicating relief efforts since Tuesday.

The number of fatal floods and landslides in India has increased in recent years and experts say climate change is exacerbating the problem.

Army teams were working around the clock to build a temporary bridge over raging waters to help search efforts after earlier relying on jury-rigged ziplines to transport bodies that had been recovered.

At least 572 millimeters (22.5 inches) of rain fell in the two days before the landslides, according to state chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

“The rainfall pattern is changing in recent years with a higher frequency, intensity, and spread of high rainfall events,” environmental expert Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People told AFP.

India’s worst landslide in recent decades was in 1998, when rockfalls triggered by heavy monsoon rains killed at least 220 people and buried the tiny Himalayan village of Malpa.

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