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When a mountain of excavated soil came crashing down onto the Meenakshi bridge near Kalladi near Meppadi in Wayanad on July 7, sweeping away a tanker lorry and claiming at least three lives, it also exposed the callousness towards disaster preparedness despite clear warnings and official alerts.

Unlike the two earlier landslides that have struck Wayanad’s natural Western Ghats slopes in recent years, this one happened at a site entirely shaped by human activity — a mound of tunnel-excavated soil stored beside a live construction project in an ecologically sensitive region prone to landslides.

Less than two weeks before the collapse, on June 25, a high-level PWD delegation inspected the Anakkampoyil-Kalladi-Meppadi tunnel project site along with officials from the District Disaster Management Authority, the State Environment Impact Assessment Authority (SEIAA), and the Konkan Railway Corporation Limited (KRCL), the executing agency.

The findings were stark enough.

The huge pile of excavated soil posed a risk of soil piping and soil........

© The Wire