By Syed Zarir Hussain, IANS
Guwahati : An Indian Air Force (IAF) helicopter pressed into service for dropping food in flood-hit Assam turned out to be a nightmare for villagers as it flew in too low, uprooting huts and injuring five people, officials said Saturday.
The MI-17 helicopter loaded with 1.5 tonnes of food packets was on a relief mission in parts of southern Assam Thursday when it created a “hurricane like situation” in human settlement areas below, a government spokesman said.
“When the pilots flew the chopper past some villages in the Barak Valley for dropping food packets, the rotors triggered a storm-like situation with close to 25 mud-and-thatch huts uprooted and also injured five people in the process,” a Cachar district administration official said by telephone.
Two of the injured were later shifted to the Silchar Medical College.
“It was probably a freak incident. You cannot airdrop food packets from a high altitude and hence the pilots brought down the helicopter, but it appears the huts that were said to have been damaged were very weak,” IAF spokesman Binoy Chongtam told IANS by telephone from the Eastern Air Command headquarters in Meghalaya capital Shillong.
But people in general appreciated the IAF for providing relief to thousands of people in southern Assam’s Cachar, Karimganj and Hailakandi districts.
“The food packets and water bottles airdropped by IAF helicopters helped hundreds of people to survive with communication links snapped for close to a week now,” the Cachar district official said.
Meanwhile, three people were killed and four wounded Saturday in landslides triggered by heavy rains in Assam, taking the death toll in floods and mudslides since July to 77, officials said.
A police official said three houses in Guwahati were demolished when a hillock caved in.
“Mounds of earth fell on a cluster of mud-and-thatch huts resulting in the death of three people and four were injured,” said Rajen Singh, a police official.
Large swathes of Assam continue to reel under a severe wave of flooding with the surging waters of the main Brahmaputra river flowing above the danger mark in 17 different places.
“The overall situation is still grim with an estimated 11 million people displaced by the floods since July. Millions of people are still lodged at makeshift camps and on raised embankments,” Bhumidhar Barman, Assam revenue, relief and rehabilitation minister, told IANS.
The floods that began in July have so far hit about 10,000 villages in 25 of Assam’s 27 districts – the worst hit being Cachar, Karimganj, Hailakandi, Dhubri, Morigaon, Barpeta, Lakhimpur and Nalbari.
“In the current wave of flooding that began Sep 1, an estimated 551,000 hectares of land area have been affected and 42 people have died in separate incidents of drowning. In two earlier waves of floods, 35 people were killed,” the minister said.