Body of the sewerage worker Anthaiah has reportedly been recovered on Monday, close to a week after he went missing inside the manhole at Padmavathi Colony near Vanasthalipuram.
According to eyewitness accounts, his body was found quite by coincidence, when a jetting machine was being test run at a manhole on the Sahebnagar main road. While officials confirmed the news, there has not been any official communication from the GHMC about the same.
The two workers, Shiva and Anthaiah were summoned by the GHMC contractor to Padmavathi Colony where he was carrying out de-silting works on Tuesday night. First, Shiva got into the manhole to fix the rope of the bucket cleaning machine deployed for de-silting works, and when he started gasping for breath, Anthaiah reportedly went in to help him. While both the workers died, body of Anthaiah could not be fished out as he fell deeper into the sewerage pipeline.
GHMC officials could not locate the body for several days, despite scouring the sewerage line and also the lake at Pasumamula village where the drainage line emptied.
Judged by the location it was found, the body has apparently been carried along with the flow to the sewage trunk-main along the Sahebnagar main road, about a kilometer away from the spot where Anthaiah went missing.
While GHMC officials refused to budge from the narrative that the drain was of storm water and not sewage, shape of the manhole cover spoke for itself. Storm water drain catch-pit covers are typically square in shape and trellis-like in structure to allow for faster drainage of rain water. Sewerage manhole covers, on the other hand, are round in shape and solid in structure, like the one covering the manhole into which both the workers got down and got killed.
In the city, storm water drains and sewage channels accommodate both rain water and sewage flows, as the lines are all interconnected.
