Hyderabad floods: Locals battle floodwaters to recover bodies

Hyderabad: Youngsters Sohail (26), Rehman (24), Aslam (22), Faizan (21) and Faisal (19) over the past few days have been hailed as saviors by locals as they bravely took the responsibility of reaching inundated streets of Al Jubail Colony at Faluknama in the Old City. They sunk into rescue work out of sheer humanity, but not even in their wildest dreams had any one of them expected to witness death.

On Monday, Faizan, who was wading through the lanes in a make-shift boat made out of wooden sticks and iron barrels, felt something touching his feet. it sent shivers down his spine, and to his horror it turned out to be a corpse. “We pulled out a dead-body, much to our horror, and bought it out,” he said. The body, still unidentified, has been shifted to the Osmania General Hospital for post-mortem.

The group also identified another dead body of a man near the Faluknama flyover earlier. Several people had been washed away in the devastatng floods that have ravaged Hyderabad, and went missing is parts of the city following heavy rain last week. Police officials said that flood victims can visit Osmania Hospital for identification.

In the ongoing flood-relief operations, access for both the police and outsiders was difficult, it was the locals who were the heroes. On one hand, they waded through water precariously and ferried flood-hit persosn to safer places and on the other hand, provided all essential items to the residents of the flood-hit areas.

“We reached into the interiors of the Al Jubail Colony, wading through chest-high water on Monday afternoon,” Sohail told siasat.com. The GHMC officials in charge of rescuing could not go much further, he said. “When people of a two-storied building saw our boat coming in the lane, they screamed for help,” Faizan said. The building was flooded till the first floor, he recollected.

The southern part of the city witnessed incessant rainfall which led to an alarming increase in water levels of lakes across the city such as Gurram Cheruvu, Balapur Lake, Jalpally Lake, Shaheen Nagar Lake and other nalas. When they breached, it flooded several low-lying residential areas of the city.