Meppadi (Wayanad): The football ground inside Harrisons Malayalam's tea garden near Sentinel Rock looks like a river basin - the water drained out but the surface is soaked and blanketed in silt and debris.

The landslide in Vellarimala that razed lives and homes in Mundakkai and Chooralmala made an incursion into the football ground, too, sitting on the edge of Chooralmala stream.

"As the ground (carved out of the hill) has natural embankments on three sides, we suspect, people washed away from Mundakkai might have been on the ground," said a Fire and Rescue personnel. But his team of 10 rescue workers have been standing on the edge of the hill for nearly four hours, waiting and watching an excavator preparing the ground to introduce bigger long-reach excavators to search for bodies.

"There is nothing we can do. The muck on the ground is waist deep," said an officer who attempted to look for bodies, physically, the stain of the dirt reaching up to his thighs. The long-arm excavator arrived at 3 pm.

But in the drizzle, three young techies from Kochi were trekking the hill towards Mundakkai. They were carrying two briefcases with drone cameras and thermal sensors. "This search has entered the third day but technology is absent," said Arshif T (29), founder of Drone Imagination, a startup, not hiding his disappointment.

"They should have flown drones fitted with GPR to look for people and bodies trapped in the debris on day one," he said, referring to ground-penetrating radar recently used in the unsuccessful search for Kozhikode truck driver Arjun in Uttara Kannada's Shirur.

Arshif's wife and business head Sumayya Manaf said the thermal sensor with them was not of much use on the third day as the chances of finding a live person had dwindled. "If those trapped are alive, the thermal sensor will show red because it will pick up the body heat," she said. Moreover, thermal sensors can scan only the surface.

In contrast, ground-penetrating radar can send high-frequency radio waves 5m down the ground to search for bodies, the couple said. The radar pulses travel through the ground and are reflected to the surface when they hit different materials or interfaces.

"An expert can interpret the radar images and guide the search workers to the specific areas," he said. People and agencies engaged in search operations, from the Army and National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) to Fire and Rescue personnel and civilian volunteers are relying on their hunch and experience to search for bodies.

"We are focusing our search on debris deposition zones, which can range from a few cents to three acres," said an Army officer of the Madras Regiment spearheading the search operation in Meppadi panchayat. Kerala's Fire & Rescue personnel said they are focusing on collapsed houses.

The search teams have, however, found a dependable ally in cadaver two sniffer dogs (Belgian malinois) from Kerala Police's K9 Squad and three sniffer Labradors from Army's Remount and Veterinary Corps (RVC). K9 Squad's two cadaver sniffer dogs, Murphy and Maya, helped find 10 bodies and the Army's Sara, Dixie and Jackie have helped find one.

When contacted, Wayanad collector Meghashree D R said a GPR was arriving Friday evening from the State Emergency Operations Centre (SEOC) in Thiruvananthapuram. SEOC is the research and technology laboratory of the State Disaster Management Authority (SDMA). The Army has requested for provision of special equipment for augmenting ongoing search (Remote Sensing Equipment of NTRO & Recco Rescue System)

Mapping the disaster zone
A team of six techies of Drone Imagination was called in by the Collector to help in the search operation. They said they will first map the disaster zone -- spread across five sq km -- and share the data with the Army to help them search for bodies better. "We have completed mapping 60 per cent of the area and the rest will be completed today," said Arshif on Friday.

They used drones to photograph the area and then stitched together the photos to make a map of the disaster-hit areas. "We then superimposed the map on the map before the disaster to find the houses and buildings that were there," said Arshif. Around 300 houses came in the disaster-affected areas, he said. "With specific information on where their houses are, the Army will be able to use their resources efficiently," he said.

But he still bets on GPR for the best use of resources. It costs around Rs 30 lakh. The thermal sensor cost only Rs 5 lakh. "GPR is the best technology we have today and we should have been using it without delay," he said.