Inmates trapped in marooned orphanage in Orissa

An aerial view of a flood affected village in Kendrapada district in Orissa on Sunday. Photo: PTI

About 80 persons including some orphan children and elderly persons are stranded in a flooded village of Kendrapara district for the past two days.

The orphanage housing them in Patalipanka village has been marooned and is completely swamped by flood water from one of the tributaries of river Mahanadi.

“The stranded inmates at the centre are safe. We are planning to evacuate them from the flooded shelter home,” said Rudra Narayan Mohanty, district emergency wing officer.

As the ground floor of the shelter home housing 160 persons was submerged with flood water the children and some elderly persons were shifted to the first floor.

“We are running out of food stocks. There is also acute shortage of drinking water. The stranded inmates also includes some infants and old people. They always need specialised care and food. With limited resources, we are trying to take maximum care of the inmates,” said Khetrabasi Behera, advisor of the shelter-home in Marshaghai block of the district.

Luckily, none of the inmates have so far fallen sick.

The centre is surrounded by ten-foot-high flood water making it impossible to move out till the water recedes.

As flood alert was sounded, 75 inmates, mostly teenagers were shifted to a short-stay home on the outskirts of Paradip port town. Before other inmates could be moved, floodwater came pounding towards the locality.

“The shelter home had met a similar crisis when flood struck the area in 2006. It was coast guard personnel from Paradip who had safely evacuated them in 2006,” said Nagendra Behera, former Zilla Parishad president.

“The orphanage located in a low-lying patch is often water-logged. The orphanage management should have been more cautious. It should have shifted all the inmates before the area got flooded,” said the district emergency officer.

“The orphanage functionaries apprised us of their plight only late yesterday afternoon. We are doing everything to ensure the safety of the stranded inmates of the centre,” said district collector Pradipta Kumar Pattnaik.