ALUVA: Fear was still written all over the faces of those who were rescued from different parts of the flooded Aluva town which had turned into a mere extension of the Periyar. There were elderly people who were drained and exhausted. Several children were still holding on to their parents. They were all part of the hundreds of people who were rescued by search teams and volunteers from inundated regions in Aluva on Friday and dropped in boats and trucks near the Marthanda Varma Bridge , one of the only few locations in the town still above water.Boats and trucks were arriving every 10 minutes with people from locations as far as Chalakudy and from within Aluva. All the byroads leading to the Aluva Junction in front of the Priyadarshini Hall had turned into small rivers flowing with full force.Santosh Kumar and his family of four were stranded in their home for three days before they were finally rescued by Friday noon. “I didn’t even realize that three days have passed. Things would have been okay for us if we had not ran out of drinking water. We started getting a flurry of calls after my daughter sent messages on Facebook Live. They were not rescue workers but people who were worried about us. Soon, our phones ran out of batteries. We charged our phones with an invertor and by the time rescue workers reached us we had just 6% charge left in the only phone which was still on,” said Santosh.He said he was involved in rescue works on Tuesday. “I was monitoring the water levels every half an hour. But on Tuesday night, around 3am, water rushed in suddenly and our ground floor was inundated leaving us stranded,” he said.For Joby and her daughter, both residents of Aluva, the wait was long. “We were scared as the water in front our house was flowing faster than Periyar itself. There are still at least eight people stranded there,” said Joby heading to the Metro to get out of Aluva. Residents said the rescue boats were about 50 meters away from their house and they reached them with great difficulty. “We had to jump over a boundary wall to find a higher ground and to avoid the strong currents. There were lots of snakes also, making the journey more troublesome,” said a resident. Many people are still stuck at high-rises and Navy personnel have been dropping food packets from helicopters on to the roof tops of their flats.Arun Das who jumped out of a tipper lorry at Marthanda Varma Bridge had another kind of story to tell. The Thiruvananthapuram resident had arrived in Thrissur in Thiruvananthapuram Mail. “I somehow managed to reached Chalakudy by swimming and walking. From there we found the lorry, which brought us here,” said Arun.

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