CHENNAI/THENI: R Vijayalakshmi remembers spotting the fire from less than 100 yards away. “Until the moment we saw it, we had no idea that there was a forest fire raging in the hills,” said the techie who works for IT firm Cognizant. She was part of the 24-member amateur trekking crew from Chennai that was caught in the forest fire on Kurangani hills in Theni district of Tamil Nadu.

“We had completed the uphill trek the previous day… At around 1pm, we had stopped to have lunch. We were already halfway through on the trek downhill,” she said. This is when the group noticed the fire at least 100 yards downhill, according to Vijayalakshmi. She was lucky to have managed to escape with minor burn injuries, but many could not make it.

The death toll from Sunday’s savage forest fire, which trapped an unsuspecting group of 36 trekkers, climbed to 10 on Monday. The dead included six women; 16 were hospitalised in critical condition in Madurai and neighbouring areas and 10 returned home after being administered first aid.

More than 250 personnel from the state police and revenue departments and the Indian Air Force , which pressed helicopters into the mission from Sunday evening, rescued 23 people from the site. Several of the injured received first aid at Kurangai primary health centre before officials shifted them to secondary and tertiary care centres. Only three of the 39 expedition members — most of whom were young professionals — were not at the scene and escaped unscathed.

As the scope of the tragedy widened on Monday, evidence emerged that the forest department had not reacted with adequate speed to alerts it had received from the Forest Survey of India about a “thermal anomaly” near the spot where the blaze surrounded the trekkers.

The FSI sent out initial alerts on the fire at 11.20am on Sunday.

This was after the FSI’s remote sensing sensors detected the “thermal anomaly” near Bodi in Theni. In the next three hours, two more alerts were sent by the central organisation based in Dehradun which were however ignored. It wasn’t until 4.30pm — five hours after the first alert — that the state forest department finally reacted.



In Video: Tamil Nadu: Trekkers still trapped in forest fire, rescue operations on