A 68-year-old woman found drifting in the flooded Manimala river was rescued by villagers at Kuttoor, near Thiruvalla, on Thursday.
The woman, Omana Surendran from Kavumpady in Manimala, reportedly slipped and fell into the flooded river early Thursday. A passer-by found the woman clinging to a bunch of bamboo plants and drifting along the swollen river near the railway over-bridge at Kuttoor around 9.45 a.m. He passed on the information to his friends at Kuttoor junction, about a kilometre downstream. In the next 20 minutes, villages blocked the bamboo cluster at Thondara bridge in Kuttoor and rescued the woman. By then, she had covered a distance of around 40 km from Manimala to Kuttoor.
She was conscious and gave her son’s telephone number to the local people. The villagers rushed her to the Thiruvalla taluk hospital and her son, Rajesh, reached there by noon. She said she accidentally fell in the river in the morning and managed to stay afloat by holding on to the bamboo plants.
Her son took her to the Government Medical College Hospital in Kottayam. Her condition is stated to be stable.
