Wayanad: Relentless downpours and howling winds hampered Wednesday’s search for survivors of landslides that struck Indian tea plantations and killed at least 150 people, most believed to be laborers and their families.
Days of torrential monsoon rains have battered the southern coastal state of Kerala, with blocked roads into the Wayanad district disaster area complicating relief efforts.
With the only bridge connecting the worst-hit villages of Chooralmala and Mundakkai washed away, rescue teams were forced to cart bodies on stretchers out of the disaster zone using a makeshift zipline erected over raging flood waters.
Several who managed to flee the initial impact of the landslides found themselves caught in a nearby river that had burst its banks, volunteer rescuer Arun Dev told AFP at a hospital treating survivors.
“Those who escaped were swept away along with houses, temples and schools,” he said.
Senior police officer M.R. Ajith Kumar told AFP that around 500 people had been rescued since successive landslides struck before dawn on Tuesday.
“So far we have got more than 150 bodies,” he said.
“Still large areas are to be explored and searched to find out whether live people are there or not.”
Wayanad is famed for the tea estates that crisscross its hilly countryside, which rely on a large pool of laborers for planting and harvest.
A number of brick-walled row homes built to accommodate seasonal workers were inundated by a powerful wall of brown sludge as laborers and their families slept inside.
Other buildings were caked with mud as the force of the landslide scattered cars, corrugated iron and other debris around the disaster site.
“Catastrophic debris flows are extremely violent, so survival is very difficult,” Hull University earth scientist Dave Petley told AFP.
“This will have been exacerbated by the timing — in the early hours when people were asleep — and by flimsy structures that offered little protection.”
More than 3,000 people were sheltering in emergency relief camps around Wayanad district, the state government said.
At least 572 millimeters (22.5 inches) of rain fell in the two days leading up to the landslides, according to state chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan.
Kerala’s disaster agency said more rain and strong winds were forecast for Thursday with the likelihood of “damage to unsafe structures” elsewhere in the state.
Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, who until recently represented Wayanad in parliament, said he had been unable to go through with a planned visit to the disaster.
“Due to incessant rains and adverse weather conditions we have been informed by authorities that we will not be able to land,” he said in a post on social media platform X.
“Our thoughts are with the people of Wayanad at this difficult time,” he added.
Monsoon rains across the region from June to September offer respite from the summer heat and are crucial to replenishing water supplies.
They are vital for agriculture — and therefore the livelihoods of millions of farmers, and food security for South Asia’s nearly two billion people — but they also bring regular destruction.
The number of fatal floods and landslides has increased in recent years, and experts say climate change is exacerbating the problem.
“Events like landslides, they are part of these climate-change-triggered heavy rainfall disasters,” Kartiki Negi of the Indian environment think tank Climate Trends told AFP.
“India will continue to see more and more of these kinds of impacts in the future,” she added.
Damming, deforestation and development projects in India have also exacerbated the human toll.
India’s worst landslide in recent decades was in 1998, when rockfalls triggered by heavy monsoon rains killed at least 220 people and buried the tiny village of Malpa in the Himalayas.

Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, praised the vision of Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts in the foreword of a forthcoming book that could conflict with the Trump campaign’s effort to distance itself from Heritage’s Project 2025 transition effort.
The Associated Press obtained a copy of the foreword to Roberts’ forthcoming book “Dawn’s Early Light” on Tuesday, the same day of a shakeup at Project 2025, which has become an important election-year issue as Democrats and others argue that the nearly 1,000-page vision it set out is extreme.
“Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,” Vance writes in his foreword. “The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”
Vance’s words, which echo Roberts’ frequent calls to tear down US institutions entirely to start anew, show the overlap between Trump’s closest allies and the people fueling Project 2025.
Still, Vance spokesman William Martin distanced Vance and the Trump campaign from Project 2025 in a statement on Tuesday.
“The foreword has nothing to do with Project 2025. Senator Vance has previously said that he has no involvement with it and has plenty of disagreements with what they’re calling for,” Martin wrote in an email. “Only President Trump will set the policy agenda for the next administration.”
Trump’s top aides have repeatedly criticized organizers of Project 2025 for what they say is a false impression that the transition effort is associated with the campaign. After Tuesday’s shakeup at Heritage, Roberts is now leading Project 2025 operations directly.
The book, scheduled to be published on Sept. 24, outlines a vision for what its publisher calls ” a peaceful ‘Second American Revolution’.” Its subtitle is “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” though earlier descriptions of the book listed it as ” Burning Down Washington to Save America.”
The publisher’s description says it identifies institutions that conservatives need to build or to take back, adding that some are “too corrupt to save.” Among those it lists are Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Also, on Tuesday, Paul Dans, who had directed Project 2025, left the Heritage Foundation amid continued criticism of the plan. Roberts said his departure came after the project completed what it set out to do.
In his foreword, Vance calls for something more than removing bad policies of the past, but instead to “rebuild.”
“We need an offensive conservatism, not merely one that tries to prevent the left from doing things we don’t like,” Vance writes.
As Vance wraps up, he quotes Roberts as saying that when twilight descends and a person hears wolves, “You’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”
“We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets,” Vance adds. “In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”
DNC spokesman Alex Floyd said in a statement that Vance’s language “echoes the same dangerous rhetoric we’ve heard from him and Donald Trump for years.”
Vance also writes about things he and Roberts have in common, including difficult upbringings, influential grandparents, and the Catholic faith. He also writes about parenthood, which has been a contentious issue for him recently after an interview resurfaced where he said Democrats running the country are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
In the book, he praises the idea that we should “encourage our kids to get married and have kids,” and teach them that marriage is a sacred union, ideas that he says come from “the old American Right that recognized — correctly, in my view — that cultural norms and attitudes matter.”