Time to salvage belongings after the savage floods

At the zero km milestone of Kallol village in Chikkodi, several women are busy washing clothes in the overflowing River Krishna.

Half the village is still submerged and the other half is limping back to normalcy. Residents whose houses are still intact have involved themselves in emptying out the water and salvaging whatever is left of their belongings.

Water has entered over 80% of the 1,100-odd houses in the village. At Kudachi in the taluk, 2,000 houses were swamped. Only a few houses remain unaffected at the almost-deserted Darur village in Athani taluk. In several villages, indications of previous day's water level are writ large on the walls of the buildings.

Almost a week after the rainfall reduced, thousands of people are still waiting for the flood waters - which exceeded the 2005 flood levels - to recede, to return home.

Sanjeev Pundalik, a resident of Kallol, had left home in the early hours of August 6, due to the rising levels of Krishna and returned to a slush-filled home on August 14.

"It might take some more days for water to recede from several houses, the high school and anganwadi," he said.

At Jyothi Nagar in Kudachi town, Vijay Jyotibha said there was no power for 15 days now in the town.

"Electricity poles are also under water and power is yet to be restored," he said. A few metres away, baker Azizullah Khan and his children clean up their bakery which was completely submerged.

Officials at the deputy tahsildar's office at Kudachi say that the losses suffered were unprecedented. "None of the villages or towns close to the river banks is insulated from the floods. Reaching them has become a challenge," they said.

A KSRTC official from Jamkhandi depot, while inspecting available routes for buses to ply near Shankarahatti in Athani taluk, said, of the 112 routes on which buses are run by the depot, services on 40 are yet to resume.

"The situation is same in all depots in the area and complete normalcy will be restored only after the water covering thousands of hectares of land recedes."