THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The election-day could not have come at a worse time for the poor fishing families living along the 'one-and-a-half'-kilometre coastal stretch from Valiyathura to Beemapally. Right after midnight on May 16 a rampaging sea breached the rocky seawall in certain areas, muscled its way through, and started pounding the huts and devouring the soil underneath them.
The district administration was intimated early in the morning but the local leaders were told that the entire machinery was out for election duty. “If they had swiftly deposited rocks in places where the sea had scooped away the soil, the situation would not have turned this worse,” said Gonsalves, a fisherman who lives in one of the threatened houses.
Before dawn could break, the sea had wrecked a thatched hut. By noon, the front portion of a soaked concrete house stood on air, with no ground beneath, like a flimsy structure dangling dangerously over a sharp edge. In between, sensing the danger, the 50-odd families living along the edge grabbed their children and the little they possessed - cooking utensils, broken furniture, clothes, and Jesus portraits – and crowded on the narrow verandah of a shrine that sits only a bit behind the line of affected houses.
With no help forthcoming, coastal folk themselves put up a fight, though a frustratingly mismatched one. The men dug up sand, filled them in empty cement sacks, carried them for a few metres, and deposited these sacks in the large voids created by a virulent sea.
This was done more in desperation than with any hope of preventing the onslaught. Even little children were found carrying rocks they could hardly hold and dropping them over the hollow. Looking at the beach encroached by the sea, Darwin, who runs a hotel in Poonthura said: “Only two days ago I had gone through this place in my Bullet.”
The families are now virtually homeless. “The schools we have here are already filled with families who were already displaced by the sea two years ago,” said Sylvester, a fisherman. “Those without relatives will have to remain in the open,” said Shirley who was protecting her little daughter from spray of the waves with her hands. Out of sheer helplessness, the parish priest of St Antony Forane Church refused to talk to Deccan Chronicle. The church’s schools area already filled.
The politicians, too, have vanished. “They were here till yesterday. But now, when we are faced with a serious problem, they are not to be found. They are too busy with the elections,” said Michael who was organising the counterattack with sand-filled cement bags.
