Berhampur: ‘Storm’, well-trained sniffer dog, along with a 5-member police team of Odisha’s Berhampur boarded a train for Wayanad in Kerala on Sunday morning to join the search operation in landslide-ravaged Chooralmala and Mundakkai.
According to sources, the K9 squad proceeded to Kerala on the direction of Odisha DGP Arun Sarangi. The team with the German Shepherd is expected to reach Palakkad on Monday and will then be taken to the landslide sites. Storm has been serving in the police force for the last seven years and has been trained to trace people trapped under debris and slush following natural calamities like earthquake and landslides.
While the toll in the July 30 landslides has touched 380-mark, the search for over 200 suspected missing persons is now in its sixth day. More personnel and equipment have been deployed in areas where the likelihood of finding bodies is high. A drone-based Intelligent Buried Object Detection System is also being used to identify locations, where bodies might be buried deep under huge boulders or logs.
Family members of Dr Swadhinn Panda, who went missing in Chooralmala while vacationing with wife and friends, have also been pinning hopes on sophisticated detection radars brought in from Siachen by the Indian Army to detect any signal of life or bodies buried in the worst-affected areas.
His sister, who along with the Odisha government team has been camping in Wayanad since July 31, has been visiting Meppadi where bodies and mutilated body parts have been kept in two facilities but without any luck. “The magnitude of devastation is such that finding a life or a body underneath the rubble becomes very difficult. We are hoping that these advanced radar systems help in tracing him,” she told TNIE.
