We were a bunch of volunteers working together under the Chennai Cares – Crisis Rescue n Relief banner and people from different NGOs and organisations came together to orchestrate the relief and rescue efforts.

However, this time around, the Kerala government’s response was phenomenal. They had created a website called www.keralarescue.in, which showed the government’s willingness for openness and transparency. It was an acknowledgement that we could reach them, put in a complaint online.

In our experience, we found so many people putting requests every five minutes. Simultaneously, Latha of Bhoomika Trust put up a helpline for those who cannot reach out on the government website. She escalated the rescue calls, ensuring action was taken. The government wanted information in a particular format, so we were working on Google forms and Excel sheets. As the website evolved, so did ours.

To weed out the repetition, we had a volunteer from Bengaluru – Naveen, who created a tool called Haystack, which helped people to see if the request was accessed before. He synced the keralarescue.in website with this tool, which cut down the repetitions and made our work easier.

We were getting at least a thousand requests a day – and this was on the fourth day after the disaster. We had calls regarding pregnant women being stranded, or somebody requiring dialysis needed to be picked up or there was a dead body in somebody’s house. This was similar to the calls we got during the Chennai Rain Relief, when Bhoomika Trust was interfacing with the Greater Chennai Corporation’s control room. Many of the volunteers have been working together since the Chennai floods and knew the ropes. We had to go through more than 50,000 requests and verify it and relay it to the authorities. There was such desperation in some of the entries.

Since our work in Chennai during the 2015 floods, we have progressed. I have had the experience of running a control room during the 2004 tsunami. It was the last time I felt alive because we were working non-stop, handling calls and connecting people. But in 2015, I was so angry – it was 10 years later and we still didn’t have our act together. Government was on its own, civil society was on its own. There was a massive distrust among the people of Tamil Nadu to work with the government. But in Kerala, the government was open and giving out alerts and warnings, which was missing in the 2015 floods here. This time, thanks to the Kerala government, we could do a lot more.