Ashok Mallappa, who works in the control room of the State Disaster Management Cell in the city, has not gone home for three days. Since the evening of September 6, Mr. Mallappa has been working in shifts, attending to calls from anxious relatives and friends of those stranded in flood-hit Jammu and Kashmir.
Sometimes he had to double up as a counsellor for callers who became emotional, worrying for their dear ones.
Answering a call in between talking to this reporter, he tried to reassure someone by saying, “As soon as we get information about your relatives, we shall call you.”
He spoke of a family which came all the way from the city’s outskirts to the disaster management cell at M.S. Buildings at 1 a.m. on Tuesday, seeking information about their relatives stranded in flood-hit State.
He said the last time he had to attend so many calls was during the Uttarakhand floods last year.
Mr. Mallappa and his colleagues are working round the clock. For Shivakumar K., who joined the cell recently, it has been an emotional four days as he was attending so many calls for the first time.
“Many youngsters who had gone to Jammu and Kashmir on a holiday are stuck there. Their desperate parents have been calling us, trying to know any little detail about them. The last couple of days have been emotional as I had to interact with many people,” he said.
