DISASTER

Sunset at Kadalundi

How a local community tackled tragedy.

R. KRISHNAKUMAR
at Vallikkunnu

EVENING is a nice time to be on the picturesque banks of the Kadalundi. But Vallikkunnu's most familiar face, former panchayat president U. Kalanathan was impatient. He was on his way back to his village, and the railway gate at the Kadalundi level crossing was taking an inordinately long time to open. After a while, a group of fishermen in another vehicle burst into animated discussion and ran towards the gate. Despite the rain, Kalanathan could not contain his curiosity. As he walked to the level-crossing, the gatekeeper told him: "The gangman is on the phone calling the station masters. He says four bogies of the Mangalore-Chennai Mail went down the Kadalundi bridge."

K.G. SANTHOSH
The capsized bogies of the Mangalore-Chennai Mail. Next to the collapsed bridge is one under construction.

At the village's western tip, where the river meets the Arabian Sea, Shinu, a young taxi driver, was about to cross the railway track when he heard the train. The 5-15 p.m. "Madras Mail" was an everyday sight as he and his friends sat around near the railway footbridge running adjacent to the rail track. "I was turning away from the train's rattle when I heard a deafening sound. Dust, smoke and water rose from behind the train, but my view was blocked by the bogies that had already crossed the bridge. I could sense that the train was dragging something on the other side of the track. Girders broke and were being yanked out. Women and children jumped out and stopped dead in their tracks as the footbridge broke and the telephone lines snapped. Some men were running to the rear. I hurried to the bridge. It was to be a long, unforgettable night. My own vehicle soon became a makeshift ambulance," Shinu told Frontline.

The Kadalundi river forms the borderline between the two north Kerala districts of Malappuram and Kozhikode. The Kadalundi bridge built by the British, was the oldest rail link in the region. Although Vallikkunnu village - where the engine and 11 (of the total 19) bogies came to a safe halt eventually - is in Malappuram district, the nearest district headquarters and big city is Kozhikode. Barely 15 minutes after it left the Kadalundi railway station, the No. 6602 Mangalore-Chennai Mail reached the Kadalundi bridge. Half the train had passed through to the other side when, for reasons yet to be ascertained, the 140-year-old bridge collapsed. Six bogies overturned, three of them into the river. The ladies' compartment was found hanging, its front portion dipped in the river.The last two bogies remained on the Kozhikode end of the broken bridge.

Rescue had to be from Vallikkunnu as official help took time to arrive. According to Vasu, and his wife Sarada, who live at the house nearest to the bridge, the first vehicle that left the village had only one injured passenger. The person who drove it was not a local resident. The drivers at the taxi and autorickshaw stands about three kilometres away from the site of the accident refused to believe him when he told them that the bridge had collapsed and that the train had derailed.

Sunil Kumar, a ward member of the Vallikkunnu grama panchayat, who was at the scene of the tragedy that evening, said that the village's own khalasis (traditional seamen with experience and skills in building boats and moving heavy equipment), as also fishermen at the local beach, sand-miners and agricultural labourers, were already at the estuary within minutes of the accident. As he drove away with the first group of the seriously injured up the narrow road, Shinu said he stopped briefly at the village junction to tell the other drivers once again.

"Nobody told the villagers what to do. Quietly, the khalasis, the fisher people and the boatmen had deployed their expertise to the rescue operation, took the lead on their own where no one else could help them. There was a huge gathering of people around the accident site. All the vehicles in the village and nearby areas were being mobilised. Along the narrow roads to the various hospitals, people had joined hands to regulate traffic and make other necessary arrangements. Everybody was working according to an unwritten plan, as if their own family members were involved in the accident," Kalanathan who had rushed to the accident site said.

Inside the ill-fated train's air-conditioned coach that had followed the engine safely into the village was the Southern Railway's Additional Divisional Manager (Palakkad Division), Titus M. Koshy, under whose jurisdiction Vallikkunnu fell. He told Frontline: "I felt nothing, except the train stopping, perhaps with a jerk. Then I heard a rear bogie was on fire."

Titus Koshy remembers that his immediate thought was that there were only a couple of hours left for darkness to fall; time would be a crucial factor in the rescue effort. "A train travelling at about 60 km an hour and plunging down a bridge, would certainly leave behind a large number of passengers dazed and with bleeding injuries and fractures. It was imperative that we took them to a hospital as quickly as possible. What I did immediately was to alert the Railway and State government authorities about the seriousness of the situation. It took only the least possible time for the police force to arrive after I called the Director-General of Police. But of the greatest help were the people of the village. They were everywhere," he said.

At the district headquarters in Malappuram, Collector Chandrasekhara Babu's telephone rang within minutes of the accident. He said: "It was more than an hour's drive from here. On the way I could see hundreds of anxious people pouring into the accident site, in cars, trucks, jeeps and autorickshaws. At first I thought they would choke the emergency traffic on the roads, especially the dilapidated and narrow 2-km stretch that led to the site. But I soon realised how involved the local people were in managing the crisis, from the way they lined up in hundreds to clear the road for the government cars and the vehicles carrying the injured."

As the first trickle of vehicles arrived with the injured at the Kozhikode Medical College, the hospital staff were ready. Doctors and other staff from every department were reporting for duty. The Superintendent of the Medical College, Kozhikode, Dr. G. Padmakumar, told Frontline that nearly 200 patients were brought to the hospital that night, a number of them with head, chest and facial injuries and fractures. The head of the Forensic Department, Dr. Shirley Varghese, said that it was clear from the accounts of the people who brought them in, that many passengers in danger of being drowned, were saved by the prompt rescue effort. Several passengers either jumped or were thrown out of the train, and were lying injured in the river. Some were crushed under heavy metal pieces. Those with head injuries could not be saved, she said. The main cause of death in cases where the victims got trapped in mud and silt was asphyxiation, she added.

The doctors were all praise for the volunteers. The Superintendent said that the response from the ordinary people and voluntary agencies was tremendous. "They just came in and took over supportive work at the hospital on their own, without anyone telling them what to do. They played a commendable role in bringing in the injured, attending to the patients, managing inconsolable relatives, controlling the crowds and in handling bodies. They also managed the problem of onlookers, especially during the visit of VIPs," he said.

At the accident site, rescue workers, emergency doctors, police and revenue officials were having a tough time. "In the initial hours, the inadequacy of the official machinery was evident," Vallikkunnu panchayat vice-president Tekkumcherry Prabhakaran said. "Often it was a case of a few officials who arrived first being overwhelmed by the scale of the effort that was required. Lights, generators and gas cutters were all in short supply. The local people provided as many cooking gas cylinders and emergency lamps as they could. Some generators too came free of cost from agencies that usually hired them out. A number of temporary electricity connections were arranged. Even kerosene lamps helped. It took nearly two hours before the men engaged in rescuing passengers were provided the necessary emergency equipment. Vallikkunnu had never prepared itself for a tragedy of this magnitude "

But everybody knew the odds. Collector Chandrasekhara Babu described the scene thus: "It was getting dark. My car was stuck in the mud. The rain was heavy. The wind was strong. There was no electricity. None of the telephones seemed to be working. My mobile phone was out of range. Some people were angry, I was told. But they were soon pacified. Finally, as the muezzin's call to prayer rose from the local mosque, I knew, we had at least a public address system. That was how I contacted the Superintendent of Police at the site."

Babu's counterpart in Kozhikode, Biswanath Sinha, was already directing operations from another point. "Kozhikode is nearer to the accident site than Malappuram is. I did not rush to the spot, though, and took about 20 minutes to arrange the logistics first," Biswanath Sinha told Frontline.

The passengers, however, needed immediate attention, and perhaps that was were the local community played another significant role. Most of the victime were in a state of shock and needed directions, transport, and access to telephones. A large number of them had one or the other of their relatives missing. Consoling them was a difficult proposition. Says Kalanathan: "We decided on a strategy. To tell them not to lose hope, that only a few of the injured were in any significant danger. We decided to send one volunteer each to help them locate their missing relatives. We asked them to enquire first at the nearby houses, the local hospitals and finally at the Medical College Hospital (MCH). Only then was there cause for concern, we told them."

Did it succeed? "From their reactions we knew it was such a big help," Kalanathan said. "I cannot forget the young man who was in despair as he could not locate his wife; he later came back with his wife to thank me - he had eventually found her at the MCH. I made announcements on the microphone asking the passengers to contact us in case they needed help. I gave the microphone to a Bengali couple, whose children were missing. It was heartrending to hear them call out to their children. We learnt that the children died."

The event was proving to be a painful one, even for police officers. For Superintendent of Police (Malappuram), Anil Kanth, the scene of the tragedy was a "disturbing sight". Admitting that it was his first personal experience with such a tragedy, he said: "The way the injured and the dead were taken out left everyone feeling bad. But there is no denying the role of the people and their eagerness to help. An overwhelming majority of them had responded spontaneously. There was need only for coordination, though at times their over-enthusiasm was a bit difficult to handle." For Inspector-General of Police (North Zone), Venugopalan Nair, the most frustrating thing was "there were so many people to help but nothing was available initially to rescue those trapped inside the bogies. Torches were unavailable, there was no electricity and the people were using what they had - cooking gas cylinders - to cut through metal and reach out to the passengers. We lost valuable time because of that."

Vallikkunnu's panchayat president Preeta Rani and her husband Balan (who live a stone's throw away from the bridge) said that the people in the locality had worked selflessly for hours under risky circumstances. In Balan's words, "throughout the night, hundreds of people struggled in drenching rain, mud and silt, sometimes in neck-deep water, to lead the passengers ashore and try and save those who could not get out of the sinking wreckage of some of the bogies. There were times when one felt that the police and fire force personnel were forced to play a subordinate role. Those who could not do anything too were in the water, waiting to have a look at the survivors."

Shinu said he made three trips subsequently to the local hospitals with the injured. It was a scary journey in the rain, because many were bleeding and in pain, he said. He returned around 7 p.m. and was told there were no more. Collector Viswanath Sinha said that "nearly 40 per cent of the injured survivors were taken to hospitals by the local people. By 7-30 p.m. all the injured were in one hospital or the other. But the people kept coming, eager to help. By 9-30 p.m. divers from the Navy had also arrived by flight, even though night landing facilities were not available at the Kozhikode airport."

"By that time, we faced another problem. Someone had to provide food to the volunteers. That was when we realised that Beerankutty, who lived in the neighbourhood, had already brought a sack of rice and had prepared kanji (rice gruel) for whoever needed food. The next day, as we were sure we would need more, the panchayat decided to pay him to buy more rice. But he told us to keep the money and tell him the food requirement. We had also sought about 500 food packets from the households in the locality. We received more than 2,000 packets that day," Kalanathan said.

Not everybody had good intentions, though. Kalanathan said that, at dusk, he was with the local sub-inspector at the edge of the broken bridge when they saw movement under water. A man was frantically rummaging through six or seven bags near a bogie. That was when they realised that "the first to arrive at such scenes of tragedy are the thieves".

The former panchayat president had perhaps witnessed the only exception to the rule that night. IGP Venugopalan Nair told Frontline that not a single case of theft was reported that day. There was no law and order problem either. It was an admirable response from the local people, but for whom the death toll would have been much higher.

Southern Railway's Medical Officer Dr. M. Ramaswamy, who was the first doctor to reach the accident sites at both Perumon (near Kollam where 106 people died in July 1988) and Vallikkunnu, told Frontline: "The difference was striking. At Perumon too people had gathered in large numbers and had helped in the rescue work. But the sincerity and dedication that the people here showed towards the passengers stand out."

Panchayat president Preeta Rani said she heard several tales of the actual rescue process - of how as the tide was rising, limbs had to be amputated to save those trapped inside, of how two passengers were trapped under a dead man's body and what the rescue workers had to do to save them, of the smell of burning flesh as rescuers used gas cutters to save another, of orphaned hands conjoined in death (perhaps cut off during rescue work), and so on. "There is no doubt that the work was a dreadful experience," she said.

There was heavy rain all over Kerala that night and, with television channels initially relaying alarming reports on the possible death roll, concern rose as to whether the Bangalore-Thiruvananthapuram Island Express tragedy at Perumon would pale into insignificance. The National Highway 47 from Thiruvananthapuram was a convoy of blinking red lights in the blinding rain that night as Ministers, revenue, police and fire force officials, and other personnel moved from the State capital to the accident site, a distance of some 475 km. By the time a Frontline team from Thiruvananthapuram reached Thrissur at 4 a.m., the first of the day's newspapers were out. Paan-shops had stocked extra copies. Restaurants that stay awake for night travellers, were full of eager readers comparing newspaper coverage. The ironic comment that "only 43 have died" could be heard everywhere. (The final official death roll was 52, with nearly 250 injured, and some of them continue to be in a critical condition at the hospitals.)

By 8 a.m. on June 23, the first of the VVIPs - among them Union Ministers Nitish Kumar and O. Rajagopal, and Chief Minister A.K. Antony - had joined the throng of people still pouring into Vallikkunnu. The survivors had all been rescued by then. But the salvaging operations had to go on.

THEORIES abound on the possible reasons for the tragedy: that the bridge's supporting pillars had sunk or had cracked; that its girders broke; that some bogies were old and defective; and, the very official one, that it was caused by "unusual geological activity in the region".

The Railways have launched what even some of its own officials described in private as a "sham of an inquiry", into Kerala's second largest train accident. O. Rajagopal told Frontline: "Safety is an important issue for us. We have already been reviewing safety norms, especially on the question of bridges. Of the total 1,19,724 bridges in the country, 51,340 are over a hundred years old and are marked for replacement as and when the money is available. Funds are the only constraint."

The Minister however was more positive when he spoke about the ordinary men and women of Vallikkunnu: "It was a commendable effort by the local people, who came out wholeheartedly, quickly and sincerely to take part in the rescue and relief effort in a remote, inaccessible part of the country. They came forward to carry almost the entire burden on their shoulders."

In the face of death and tragedy, Vallikkunnu - the sleepy little village known so far only for its mangrove islands and exotic migratory birds, model development projects with people's participation, and perhaps an aberrant presence of a pile of 'pipe bombs' under the Kadalundi bridge (Frontline, February 9, 1996) - had come alive to cater to the needs of the hapless survivors of the Mangalore-Chennai Mail.

That is why Shinu, Balan and Sunil Kumar are angry that the newspapers described the event as the "Kadalundi train tragedy" instead of the "Vallikkunnu train tragedy". They were not being parochial. Those who saw the heroes of Vallikkunnu on the night of June 22 will understand that their anger was fully justified. Kadalundi is the river of death, while Vallikkunnu saved lives.