Shops, crops destroyed as elephants run amok

Munnar: A herd of wild elephants trekked down to a hilly countryside and destroyed two shops that also doubles up as the residence of their owners in Idukki district, while in a similar incident not far away a lone tusker spread fear in a locality before people drove it back to the forests.

Two modest businesses adjacent to a tea factory at Kannimala, alongside the Munnar-Marayoor route, suffered massive destruction in the wee hours of Monday when three elephants including a calf broke into them.

Rajakumari (58), the owner of one of the shops, escaped the animals’ wrath as she managed to hide under a concrete slab in the kitchen, while Agnimuthu (60) of the business next door was away to attend a relative’s wedding.

The elephants first entered Agnimuthu’s bakery after pushing the whole shack and felling it. They frenziedly consumed the eatables, in a replay of an incident that had happened in the place five years ago.

The elephants’ din woke up Rajakumari, who saw the pachyderms having flattened the shutter of Agnimuthu’s shop. Scared, she ran to the kitchen of her eatery, finding shelter under the concrete slab inside.

The elephants receded after a while, but only after destroying the chairs and tables of her shop. Rajakumari was widowed two decades ago, as her husband Pechimuthu had died in 1997 after being killed by a wild animal in the forests of Kannimala Top.

Past Sunday midnight, around 1 am, a much-feared elephant called Padayappa ran amok in Vauvarai Estate. It re-entered, this time the New Division, where labourers live in clusters and damaged a plantain orchard. On hearing the sound, the residents woke up. It took three hours of joined work to eventually evict the tusker from their area and push it back into the jungle from where it had come.