Remembrance · History · 10 min read

Remembering Pettimudi: The Night the Hillside Fell, 6 August 2020

Late on a night of torrential rain, a hillside above the tea workers' lines at Pettimudi, north of Munnar, gave way and buried the sleeping families below. A remembrance of the people of Pettimudi, of what happened, and of the questions the tragedy raised.

By GK Global, Adimali, Munnar · Trails & Tales by GK

Pettimudi lies about 30 km from Munnar, high in the tea country below the cliffs of Eravikulam, on the road towards Edamalakkudy. In August 2020, rows of old line houses stood there beside a stream, home to the families of tea workers of the Kannan Devan Hills Plantations Company. Many had lived there for generations; their grandparents and great-grandparents had come from the Tamil country to work on the estates. (Read the story of Munnar's tea workers.)

The night

In early August 2020, the monsoon had been pouring on the high ranges for days. Pettimudi had been cut off: electricity had failed on 2 August, and the area's only mobile tower, with no backup power, had gone silent. Late on the night of 6 August, as families slept, a mass of earth and boulders broke away from the slopes above, at the edge of Eravikulam, and came down the stream valley. It buried the line houses under metres of mud and rock.

With no power and no phone signal, and a bridge on the access road washed away, news of the disaster reached the outside world only the next morning. Rescuers arrived at about 11 am on 7 August. On the same day, an aircraft crashed at Kozhikode airport, and Kerala found itself mourning two disasters at once.

The search

Teams of the National Disaster Response Force, Kerala Fire and Rescue Services, police, forest staff, estate workers and local people dug through the mud and rubble for days, in continuing rain. Excavators cleared the debris; search dogs, including a police dog named Lily, found people buried deep in the mud. Bodies were found not only at the site but kilometres downstream in the river and forest. The search continued for about three weeks.

The official count records 66 bodies recovered and four people missing, a toll of 70, among them 14 children. An excavator operator who worked at the site from the first day until the end of the search, about 20 days, has told us that he and the rescuers recovered 84 bodies. We record both figures here.

Of 22 families affected, 14 were lost entirely, with no member left alive.

The inquiry

A special team appointed by the Idukki District Collector reported in September 2020 that the line houses at Pettimudi, built before the 1950s, stood in a landslide-prone area without proper roads, communications or safety measures, and that several other estate settlements in the high ranges faced similar risks. It recommended that plantation companies be required to ensure the safety of workers' housing and to provide motorable roads and reliable communications, and that the question of possible delay in informing the authorities be investigated further. The Geological Survey of India recommended moving people away from stream banks on the slope and banning construction near streams.

Afterwards

The Kerala government and the company each announced compensation of ₹5 lakh for each family that lost members, and the Tamil Nadu government also offered help, as many of the victims had relatives in Tamil Nadu. Survivors moved in with relatives in crowded line houses while rehabilitation and rehousing proceeded, slowly. The disaster brought national attention to the conditions in which many plantation families live, and to the fact that most of them own neither their homes nor any land.

What Pettimudi teaches

The landslide was caused by extreme rain on steep, saturated slopes, the same forces that brought the great flood of 1924 and the floods of 2018. (Read about Munnar's climate and environment.) But the scale of the loss was also shaped by where people lived, how isolated they were, and how slowly help could reach them. Pettimudi is a reminder that safety in the hills depends on careful land use, warning systems, communications and roads, and on valuing the lives of the people who work the estates.

We remember the men, women and children of Pettimudi.