Rescue personnel at the housing society in Pune on Saturday. (Express Photo by Arul Horizon)Ravi Goyal was about to retire to bed when the sound of a loud crash outside made him rush towards the balcony.
“In the dark, I could see that the compound wall of adjacent Alcon Stylus housing society had collapsed on the tin shanties occupied by some construction labourers. The shanties looked completely smothered,” Goyal, a resident of an adjacent housing society, Euphoria, told The Sunday Express.
The entrepreneur had rushed to the accident site immediately with his roommate to see if anyone was alive.
“The first thing that we saw were that cars and a school van, which were parked near the compound wall, had slide into the crevasse. We tied one of the cars with ropes so that it did not crash on the shanties below,” Goyal, who is in his late 20s, said.
Vaibhav Singh, another resident of Euphoria who had also rushed out to help, said the muffled cries of help had filled the air.
“It was horrifying… We found a person stuck underneath a tree. He was almost unscathed and we managed to pull him out immediately,” Singh said.
A fire brigade team, which had reached the accident site in some time, extricated the survivors stuck under the debris one by one.
Along with an NDRF team, the firefighters managed to rescue all the men and pull out the bodies of all the 15 men killed in the accident by 11 am on Saturday.
Prakash Gore, fire officer, Kondhwa said: “Looking at the magnitude of the incident, our team, which had initially reached the spot, asked for additional help from the fire office. As the road is very narrow, there was some problem in reaching the site. Even before the NDRF team could reach, we had extricated half-a-dozen bodies from the debris.”
