The Hindu : Kerala News : Garbage stench forces people to flee their homes

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Wednesday, Jul 11, 2007
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Kerala

Garbage stench forces people to flee their homes

K.P.M. Basheer

53 families from Brahmapuram seek refuge in school

Photo: Vipinchandran

ENDLESS WOES: Trucks carrying garbage to be dumped at the proposed Brahmapuram garbage treatment plant near Kochi. —

BRAHMAPURAM (Ernakulam dt.): They are refugees of a different kind — they had fled stench. The 53 families housed at GBLP School are said to be the first people in the country to have been relocated to a ‘refugee camp’ because of unbearable garbage stench.

Unable to stand the stench blowing from over 100 truckloads of decaying garbage dumped in their midst by Kochi Corporation, these nearly 200 inmates at the camp had to flee their homes in the vicinity of the proposed Brahmapuram garbage plant on Friday. “The stench was so severe that we could not breathe properly,” an elderly woman inmate told The Hindu.

“A couple of residents swooned and a dozen felt nauseated and many people had to seek medical help.”

The ‘refugees,’ mostly women and children, are confined to the school hall for most of the day because of the rain; at night, they sleep on the plastic mattresses spread out on the cement floor. Their men, braving the wet winds and the mosquitoes, sleep on the school benches lined along the veranda. Meals are sponsored by different organisations and generous individuals.

While the GB School has been closed for a couple of days, some of the child inmates go to their respective schools in the morning and return to the camp in the afternoon. These five days have been the gloomiest in their lives, the women say.

Most of these families are agriculturists or cattle breeders. They left their homes unprotected and their cattle unfettered.

After the Corporation started dumping tonnes of rotten garbage every day for five days — brought in by police-escorted convoys of ‘tipper lorries’ —the cattle had stopped eating grass in the vast open spaces in the sleepy neighbourhood. “Even animals were unable to eat because of the stench,” one woman remarked.

The women recall last Friday’s events with horror. Nearly 25 lorries, all carrying stinking garbage from Kochi, jammed the narrow village roads, which had already been potholed and slushy.

The garbage convoy was escorted by several police jeeps and vans and over 100 policemen and women.

As the convoy passed along, people held their noses. The slush spun off by the lorries had landed in the barrels of milk being collected at a roadside Milma collection centre. (Brahmapuram is a key milk-producing village in Ernakulam district). This ruined the entire milk (which was spilt on the road the following day). The women who had assembled at the Milma centre blockaded the returning lorries. Meanwhile, one lorry got stuck in the muddy road and the other lorries all got held up.

The stench emanating from all these lorries for hours made the locals sick and a dozen of them had to be hospitalised. They complained of nausea, headache, upset stomach and fever.

This set off an alarm in the area, already hit by the chikungunya scare. “We thought we will all contract chikungunya and die,” one woman said. Ms. Sainaba, the local anganwadi worker, said the stench was so strong that she swooned in her anganwadi and there was nobody to take her to hospital.

By then, most of the 53 families in the Chellippadam area, where the dumping had taken place, had left their homes.

The panchayat authorities asked them to stay at GB School and arranged for medical aid and other amenities. The people have been staying in the school ever since.

Now that the meeting called by the Chief Minister in Thiruvananthapuram has decided that there would be no more dumping of Kochi’s garbage in Brahmapuram, the ‘refugees’ could think of going back to their homes.

C.I. Sulaiman, treasurer of the Brahmapuram Action Committee, said the committee wanted the panchayat and district authorities to ensure protection for the residents from the garbage already dumped at Chellippaadam before they returned home.

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