Bureaucrat Arun Srivastava's wife Sunita, however, died under the debris (Express Photo, File) Sixteen hours after a chunk of the sixth floor collapsed all the way down to the first floor at Chintels Paradiso society in Gurgaon’s Sector 109, rescue workers managed to pull out bureaucrat Arun Srivastava who was stuck under the rubble inside his flat. His wife, Sunita, died under the debris.
On Thursday evening, the drawing room of an apartment on the sixth floor of Tower D caved and fell through the fifth, fourth, third and second floors, before crashing to the first-floor apartment which belonged to the couple. Srivastava, an Indian Railway Service of Engineers officer, and his wife were in their drawing room at the time. Srivastava was conscious, and his leg (below the knee) was caught under the rubble. Rescue teams took him out alive, with his leg intact.
The rescue operation included personnel from the police, district administration, fire brigade, health department, the state disaster response force and 115 personnel from the National Disaster Response Force.
Rescuers shift the bureaucrat to an ambulance (Express photo) Said NDRF Commandant P K Tiwari, “We got the information at 7 pm and the RRC Dwarka team got here by 7.30 pm, which was joined later by two teams from the Ghaziabad headquarters… The building is quite unstable and in a dangerous condition; working in that was itself is a challenge. While rescuing, the biggest responsibility for us is that no rescuer gets injured… the trapped person was in a very critical position from where we took him out.”
According to personnel involved in the operation, reaching Srivastava’s leg through the debris in an unstable structure without further destabilising it was a challenge.
Roof of 6th floor apartment in Gurugram society collapses, rescue operations underway
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“The entire drawing room of the sixth floor had fallen down there, going through the other floors… The entire lower right leg, up to the knee, of the man was caught under the debris. The only way to work in that situation is to create a pocket in the debris, just like a foxhole. We first stabilised all the debris above using shoring metal. After that, we made a foxhole to create an approach till his foot. Once we created that, we used specialised equipment called airbags to raise the debris enough to release 60-70% of the leg. For the remaining 30%, we had to use ropes like those used for lifting or climbing to cover his body in a harness. We used airbags to lift some more debris and pulled him out from there,” said Deputy Commandant Kuleesh Anand.
The need to amputate Srivastava’s leg to release him was a possibility that had been considered both on Thursday night and Friday morning. “In the morning, the NDRF team again suggesting cutting his leg. The Deputy Commissioner consulted the civil surgeon team, which checked and found that his leg was fine and not even fractured… cutting would have caused too much trauma,” said an official in the district administration.
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