The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : In the same boat, they pull together

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Friday, Jan 28, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

In the same boat, they pull together

By Ramya Kannan

NAGAPATTINAM, JAN. 27. Off the Keechankuppam boat jetty, hundreds of trawlers lie in various stages of battering, nestling in necrotically and concealing under their vast fibre and iron structures men and women, dead and bloated.

For nearly three weeks after the tsunami struck, the Nagapattinam district administration was busy removing broken boats washed onto main roads, rail track and bridges. As officials were carving access through the clutter of boats, the locals looked on, pitching in now and then, letting their sunken boats remain off the jetty. They were waiting for better days to retrieve the boats.

For a week now with the roads cleared and new causeways taking the place of old bridges, all eyes are on the boats, which have beached at the jetty in the Kaduvai river.

Crowds gather on the bridge watching the local fishermen paddle up in catamarans to certain spots in the river. They dive in with thick blue and yellow nylon rope in hand and tie it to the end of a sunken vessel. At the other end of the rope, others work furiously, winding it around the back of a revving bulldozer. At a call from the locals, the bulldozer inches forward on the thick blackened beach sand.

It seems a futile exercise but then a shaft emerges, cutting the water surface smoothly. Then there is a shout of joy. The bulldozer, seemingly enthused by the loud calls, crawls faster. That monster swerves deftly to deflect the boat hitting against another half-sunken vessel and finally hauls it onto the sands. A small crane picks up the wreckage and drops it safely aside.

The catamarans then move to another spot, where a piece of wood is bobbing up and down. "See that there, it's the stern of a boat. If it is not too huge, it will be dragged out," Chandrakumar, a fisherman of Keechankuppam, explains.

His relative, Bala Murugan, paddling half-a-catamaran in the waters below, calls out to him. "It has been ages since I saw you. Like God, you are difficult to spot, eh?" Chandrakumar tells him, as a bunch of friends joins him on the broken bridge. Before his cousin replies, he is distracted by yet another boat surging up. "Look at that one. Not much damage, once you pump water out. But it needs to be repaired before it goes out to the sea once again," he says.

Keechankuppam being a centralised harbour facility for the area, fishermen from as far as Tarangambadi come over to help.

Standing on the bridge, Ponnukutti says, "It will probably take a year for us to get our act together. The longer it takes to retrieve them (boats), the more unusable they will be."

Koodankulam

crane coming

Additional Collector (Relief) Ranvir Prasad says an 80-tonne crane is coming tomorrow from Koodankulam in Tirunelveli district to Keechankuppam to shift the bigger boats out of the way. It will have to be reassembled at the spot and is likely to make retrieval easier.

Nearby on the shore the bulldozer has begun purring again to drag a boat's rusty winch (used to haul nets) out of water. The engineer from the Agricultural Engineering Department gives the call, "Heave!" And the locals pull the ropes lying crusted with sand out of the way and move out as the machine thunders forward, shaking the earth underfoot.

There is work to be done, again.

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