Bengaluru: The death toll in the Bellandur building collapse went up to six with the last body of a man being retrieved from the rubble on Friday by the rescue personnel, who called off the operation in the evening after scanning the entire area for more bodies and anyone alive.
“Around 11 am, the body of a 28-year-old man was retrieved by our personnel, who later identified him as Krishna, a tile laying worker from West Bengal,” said Mr Revanna, DIG Fire & Emergency Services.
Krishna was laying tiles on the third or fourth floor when the building collapsed said his fellow workers, who were injured after the five-storey under-construction building collapsed on Wednesday.
“His body was found crushed underneath the ground floor’s staircase where he had probably reached after running down from the 3rd or 4th floor,” said a rescue personnel. “Krishna body’s posture looked like he would have survived if he had just another half-a-minute,” he said.
After Krishna’s body was retrieved, the personnel searched for more bodies and trapped victims, but the Victim Locating Cameras (VLC) indicated no thermal images of any life in the rubble. They finished scanning the entire area and called off the rescue operations by Friday evening.
“The rescue operations were carried out swiftly and with ease as most part of the building collapsed on a corner site where there were two adjoining roads. But the roads are narrow. If the collapse had happened in a site surrounded by high-rise buildings, the casualties would have been more and the rescue efforts would have been difficult. Usually for such high-rise buildings, the approach roads should be wider. Civic authorities should be blamed for allowing these violations,” a fire force personnel said.
Mr M.N. Reddi, DGP, Fire and Emergency Services, personally monitored the rescue operations till Friday evening.
The Civil Defence personnel were not called in on Friday. Four people who were grievously injured and undergoing treatment at a private hospital were sent home.
The rescue personnel along with the equipment left the site on Friday evening. BBMP officials were overseeing the work by earthmovers that were clearing the rest of the debris at the collapse site.
