A man who entered a ‘suranga’ (horizontal well excavated on a laterite hill) in a village in the Badiadka police station limits in Kasaragod district on November 29 to hunt a porcupine died after the tunnel caved in, the police and Fire and Rescue Services personnel have said.
The deceased has been identified as Narayana Naik, alias Ramesha, 45, a daily-wage labourer and a native of Posaligumpe, near Bayar in the Puthige grama panchayat, in Kasaragod district.
It took nearly 24 hours for the Fire and Rescue Services personnel to recover the body from the suranga on Friday. The suranga was prone to landslips and low in oxygen, according to officers of the Uppala fire station.
The Badiadka police and the Fire and Rescue Service personnel said Naik had entered the narrow suranga in pursuit of the porcupine around 5.30 p.m. on Thursday. His four friends who accompanied him waited outside. Though they had also entered the suranga when Naik failed to respond to their calls after some time, they hastily returned after they felt suffocated inside, the officials added. The attempt of his friends to drag Naik out of the cave using a rope had also failed, they said.
Distress call
A Fire and Rescue Services unit got the first distress call around 8.30 p.m. on Thursday. The entrance of the suranga was five feet high but its width was just 1.5 ft and the height also decreased inside. The personnel said that one person could walk on his knee for up to 20 metres, but beyond that one should crawl. Naik crawled in several feet further and he was found half-buried under the laterite soil, they said.
The rescue personnel had worked nearly four hours on Thursday and emptied four oxygen cylinders.
On Friday, 20 rescue personnel from Kasaragod and Uppala stations resumed the rescue work. Workers familiar with suranga digging also assisted the rescue personnel.
They manually removed the earth to widen the suranga and clear the earth by walking backwards. Using five more oxygen cylinders, the rescue personnel could reach the body around 4 p.m. on Friday.