The office of the Wayanad District Collector has refused to acknowledge the landslide alert issued by the Kalpetta-based Hume Centre for Ecology and Wildlife Biology. Right to Information activist M T Thomas had asked the Collector’s office six questions.
The first thing he wanted to know was whether the office had received the Hume's Centre's alert. Citing newspaper reports, Thomas said that the Centre had alerted the district administration about the possibility of landslides in Mundakkai and surrounding areas "a full 16 hours prior to the disaster."
The Centre had issued the alert at 9 am on July 29, Monday. The reply was both vague and non-committal. "This office has not received any alerts officially," said the reply furnished by the State Public Information Officer, Disaster Management Wing, Wayanad Collectorate. This could mean two things. Either the Collector's office had not received any such alert, or the alert from the Hume Centre, if at all it had arrived, could not be considered an official warning.
This brief reply rendered the remaining five questions/requests 'not applicable'. One is the time of receipt of the report. Two, furnish a copy of the above alert received by you. Three, was any action taken on the basis of the above report. Four, provide the Action Taken Report (ATR) on the matter. Five, the name and designation of the official who has been asked to do the follow-up.
The data generated by the Hume Centre, which has over 200 weather stations in Wayanad, indicated that Puthumala, the nearest weather station to Mundakkai, received 200 mm of rainfall on July 28, followed by another 130 mm overnight. Since a landslide could be triggered by approximately 600 mm of rain, the Centre had issued a landslide alert at 9 a.m. on August 29. Eventually, it was found that the area had received 572 mm of rain within 48 hours.
It is this information that the Wayanad administration has now disowned. It is not as if the Wayanad administration takes the alerts from the Hume Centre lightly. It was following the Centre’s alert in 2020 that a landslide looked highly probable in Mundakkai that the district administration had swiftly moved to relocate people, and thus prevented the loss of human lives.
However, this time, the Hume Centre's warning was not acted upon. The Hume Centre director CK Vishnudas had told Onmanorama that information was passed on to the District Emergency Operating Cell (DEOC), hinting especially at the need to evacuate villagers from Mundakkai.
The district administration did issue a warning that day, but only by 10.35 p.m. on August 29, nearly 14 hours after the Hume Centre alert. Even this warning had not factored in the urgency of the situation. It did not have any mention of evacuation. "I will go for an appeal," the RTI activist, M T Thomas, said.
The Hume Centre for Ecology and Wildlife Biology is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) dedicated to climate research in Wayanad. The NGO operates a comprehensive network of over 200 weather stations across the district. These stations monitor daily weather conditions, including rain and temperature. The data collected is shared daily via a WhatsApp group that includes key district administration officials, such as the District Collector.
