History repeated in the most tragic manner possible at Mundakkai in Wayanad in the early hours of Tuesday. The small town which has been wiped off and where many lives were lost in the devastating landslide had witnessed a landslide of comparatively lesser magnitude but a fatal one in 1984. It was on July 1, 1984, Mundakkai recorded a debris flow that took 14 lives. Sekhar Kuriakose, who is the Member Secretary (ex-officio) of Kerala State Disaster Management Authority has recalled this incident in his article 'History of landslide susceptibility and a chorology of landslide-prone areas in the Western Ghats of Kerala'.
The debris flow had an average width of 150 m and it travelled 1.5 km from the initiation point of 840 m downhill. The volume of material that initiated the debris flow made it the biggest landslide recorded in the state then. Rainfall records showed that the region received 340 mm of rainfall on the day of the landslide, which was the peak rainfall of the year in the middle of an above-average SWM (southwest monsoon) rainfall season. The increase of pore water pressure in the already saturated clayey layer as a result of this high-intensity rainfall was considered the cause of the landslide, the article noted.
On Tuesday, weather stations near Mundakkai recorded well over 370 mm rainfall in 24 hours and the debris flowed upto 6 km.
Legislative Assembly records show that even during the 1984 landslide, dead bodies were recovered from the Chaliyar River. In reply to a submission in the Assembly on July 13, 1984, then Revenue Minister P J Joseph said: ''Two dead bodies were recovered 20 miles away from Chaliyar. The experts opined that it was difficult to recover bodies from debris that extended up to three miles measuring 100-200 feet wide and 10-50 feet height. The process to remove the earth was stopped based on this opinion from the experts. Fire Force did an extensive search but couldn't even find where the dead bodies were.”
A paper on Landslide Warning & Mitigation in Wayanad District presented in 2022 also recounts the 1984 incident. The Wayanad-Kozhikode border has been identified by the National Centre for Earth Science Studies (NCESS) as one of the most landslide-prone areas in the state. The Mundakkai, Kappikkalam, and Valamthode landslide/debris flows are the major disasters in Wayanad mentioned in the paper. The Kappikkalam Landslide near Padinjarethara occurred in 1992 and claimed 11 lives. A landslide at Valamthode in 2007 claimed 4 lives.
Mundakkai also recorded a landslide in 2019. However, as another landslide of devastating proportions hit Puthumala at the same time, Mundakkai was ignored.
On August 8, 2019, 240 mm of rainfall in 24 hours was received in the region and persisted for two days. Thirty-four families were evacuated, which included 177 persons. The incident might have taken away 22 lives had they not been evacuated early with the help of the data received from CBRMS (community-based rainfall monitoring station). After the evacuation, four houses were fully damaged at the site of the incident, but there was zero human casualties as hundreds were shifted to safer locations, recalls the 2022 paper.
