india

Updated: Mar 26, 2019 23:23 IST

A 53-year-old landlord, his two sons, and three tenants of the residential building he owned, died of asphyxia one after the other on Tuesday when they were exposed to poisonous fumes from a septic tank on the premises in the town of Nemeli in Kancheepuram district, 81 km from Chennai.

According to the police in Nemeli, the chain of deaths started at around 1pm when the landlord, identified as Krishnamurthy, who ran a grocery shop besides renting out portions of his house, peeped into the septic tank to check for blockage.

Krishnamurthy had called for a suction machine in the morning to clean up overflowing drainage and wanted to check the tank for any sign of blockage, the police said.

“As soon as he peeped in, he swooned on inhaling the poisonous gas and fell inside,” a police officer said.

His wife Latha cried for help and her two sons, Kannan, 27, and Karthik, 26, who rushed to the help of their father, were also overcome by the fumes and fell inside the tank one after the other, the officer said.

On hearing Latha’s screams, three tenants of the building — Lakshmikanth, 22, Suradha Bhai, 28, and Paramasivam, 31 — tried to enter the tank to rescue the father and sons, and perished too. It was only then that Latha called the Fire and Rescue Service.

When the rescue team arrived, local residents had gathered at the building in large numbers. Fireman Kumaresan, his face covered with a cloth, tried to get into the septic tank, but the poisonous fumes were too strong.

Incidentally, Tamil Nadu has reported the highest number of deaths of manual scavengers engaged in cleaning septic tanks over the past five years. The death count in the state stood at 144, according to a reply to a question in the Lok Sabha given in February this year by Union minister of state for social justice Ramdas Athavale. It was more than double the death toll of manual scavengers in Uttar Pradesh, according to the minister.