Soldiers display rescue capacity

Malawi Defence Force’s swiftness and rescue capacity impressed hundreds of people around St. Paul’s Minor Seminary at Mlare, some 53 kilometres east of Lilongwe City, yesterday when a saloon that had sunk in a dam was yanked ashore.

The drama started at about 5pm on Tuesday when seminary teacher Noel Kafera, using bursar Father Augustine Kaliu’s car, inexplicably skidded from a dirt road and plunged into one of the twin dams serving the seminary and surrounding villages with potable water.

Some women who saw the vehicle coasting in the water for some distance, before it sank almost in the middle of the dam, mourned, as a sombre atmosphere engulfed the rural community over the incident.

Other people who had identified the sunken vehicle spread the rumour that the well-known bursar, himself, had drowned. Yet others, who had closely identified the driver before the accident, said the man who had gone under was Kafera.

Seminary officials quickly notified the Malawi Police Service (MPS) at Mlare and, later, at the police headquarters in Area 30 in Lilongwe. Word was later spread to, among others, the MDF’s Kamuzu Barracks in Lilongwe.

Colonel Richard Zawanda, the Kamuzu Barracks-based officer in charge of MDF vehicle workshops, said when an initial assessment was done of the emergency, MDF decided to summon six divers, to locate the under-water vehicle. It also deployed a heavy-duty crane that was to haul the vehicle out of the dam.

The divers were from the MDF’s Marine Unit in Monkey Bay and the crane was from the MDF’s Engineering Division in Kasungu. What impressed most people was that although the technical assistance was deployed from distant places, the military boots and equipment were at the ready, at Mlare, in a short time.

The rescue efforts on Tuesday night went on until after midnight, as some local fishermen, two Lilongwe Golf Club volunteers and deputy director responsible for maritime safety Lloyd Saidi Banda traced where the vehicle had sank and they started pulling it to the shore.

“Among the several people who also plunged in and out of the muddy water, in the rescue operation, were MDF’s Colonel Zawanda and senior police officer Chalera,” recalls Banda, who had travelled from his Monkey Bay base in response to the emergency, which was making rounds on social media groups dealing with emergencies.

“But when we made a forced entry into the car, we were surprised that there was no driver’s body in there,” he added.

It was later established that Kafera had—somehow—survived the accident when he telephoned his young brother, Humphreys, to announce the news and to ask the relative to alert their parents at Namitete to the fact that he would be heading to the village to recover from his trauma from the incident.