Building collapse: NDRF team member heard the cry of a child under the rubble

Hyderabad: On Thursday midnight, as the 20-member team of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) was removing the piled-up rubble from the collapsed building at Nanakramguda, one of the men rushed to NDRF sub-inspector Rahul Dixit to tell him something he had been waiting to hear since the moment he landed there with his team.

“Two victims are alive under the debris. I can hear a child’s scream and a woman's choked voice,” the constable told Mr Dixit pointing in one direction.

Mr Dixit immediately alerted the other team members. What happened in the next few hours was a flawless rescue mission that proved the competence of the NDRF team.

“We stopped everything else, moved there, and removed the rubble carefully till we saw the two of them,” said NDRF sub-inspector.

He then had to carefully calculate the risks of pulling the mother and child out from under the heavy slab under which they were trapped without causing further injuries.

“When we looked closely, a concrete beam and wood used for the construction work were suspended less than half a foot above their heads. This could hinder us from pulling them out safely. Two pillars on both sides of them also hampered our chances of piercing through from one side. The only way was to dig a cave under them and pull them out from underneath,” Mr Dixit said.

Years of intensive training has taught the NDRF’s team to know what to do to keep a victim alive in such traumatic conditions. “It would take another five hours to pull them out. The boy, who had an injury on his forehead and had a stone on his leg and hand, was crying. His mother’s hands too were stuck under the rubble. Our men managed to give them water and assured them that they would be rescued. After a team of doctors arrived, we also gave them much-needed oxygen,” a rescuer said. The NDRF men succeeded in digging the cave and they carefully pulled out Rekha, 25, and her three-year-old son Deepak.

As the rescue team searched further, they found a man trapped one foot away from the mother and son. “It was Rekha's husband Shiva. But he was crushed under the rubble,” another NDRF official told this newspaper

Crash sounded like an earthquake: Witness
Eye-witnesses to the building collapse recall that at first they thought an earthquake had struck.

Twenty-nine-year-old Babita Bai and her kin, who live next door, were about to hit the sack when they felt the shaking, accompanied by a rumbling sound. They rushed out of their home thinking it was an earthquake.

“Outside, we saw the building coming down as if it was a controlled destruction. As each floor came down one after the other, the dust spread all over the area. It took some time for the dust to settle. Panic-stricken people were running out of their homes screaming,” said Babita Bai, who lives in the house adjacent to the collapsed building. Babita knows the labourers and their families who had been working there.