800,000 people flee India floodwater

Thousands stranded; death toll tops 350

CHENGANNUR, India — Flooding in southern India’s Kerala state has displaced about 800,000 people and killed more than 350 since the start of this year’s monsoon season in June, officials said Sunday, as rescuers searched for people stranded in the worst-affected areas.

The downpours that started Aug. 8 have triggered floods and landslides and caused homes and bridges to collapse across Kerala, a state known for its quiet tropical backwaters and beautiful beaches.

Thousands of rescuers were working to reach out to stranded people and get relief supplies to isolated areas, said P.H. Kurian, a top disaster management official in Kerala. He said weather conditions had improved considerably.

Kurian said nearly 10,000 people remained stranded as of Sunday but that he expected all of them would be rescued by today.

An estimated 800,000 people have taken shelter in about 4,000 relief camps across Kerala, Kurian said.

Forecasters have predicted more rain across the state through this morning.

In several villages in the suburbs of Chengannur, one of the worst-affected areas, carcasses of dead cattle were seen floating in muddy waters.

In some villages, floodwaters up to 10 feet high had entered homes.

Rescuers in a motorboat reached a hamlet where they tried in vain to persuade an 80-year-old woman, Bhavani Yamma, to be taken to a government-run shelter from her partially submerged single-story house.

“I will not come. This is my home, and I will die here,” said Yamma, who lives alone.

One of the rescuers, Rajagopal, a police constable who uses only one name, said that initially, “we didn’t anticipate it would be such a big disaster.” But he said that by Wednesday, “we realized it’s really big.”

Officials have called it the worst flooding in Kerala in a century, with rainfall in some areas more than doubling that of a typical monsoon season.

At least two trains carrying hundreds of thousands of gallons of water moved to the flooded areas from the neighboring states of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra on Sunday, the Press Trust of India news agency reported, citing Indian railway official Milind Deouskar.

After one of the trains arrived, Kurian, the disaster management official, said authorities had largely restored the state’s water-supply systems. “What we need right now is bottled water, which is easy to transport to remote and isolated places, where some people are still stranded,” Kurian said.

Officials estimate that more than 6,200 miles of roads have been damaged. One of the state’s major airports, in the city of Kochi, was closed Tuesday as a result of the flooding. It is to remain closed until next Sunday.

The Indian government said a naval air base in Kochi would be opened for commercial flights starting this morning.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi inspected the flooded landscape from a helicopter on Saturday and met with the state’s top officials, promising more than $70 million in aid. Although the central government has dispatched military units to Kerala, state officials are pleading for additional help.

Officials’ initial stormdamage estimate is at nearly $3 billion.

At least 250 people have died in the flooding in a little over a week, with 31 others missing, according to Kurian. More than 1,000 people have died in flooding in seven Indian states since the start of the monsoon season, including more than 350 in Kerala.

In Vatican City on Sunday, Pope Francis held a moment of silence during his noontime blessing to pray for flood victims in Kerala, which has a large Christian community.

“I am close to the church in Kerala, which is on the front lines in providing aid to the people,” Francis said. He called for solidarity and “the concrete assistance of the international community.”