CHENNAI: For many among the Tamil Nadu Fire and Rescue personnel who rushed to Upparapalayam near Red Hills on Sunday morning to attend to the wall collapse, it was the second such effort in a row, coming close on the heels of the massive rescue efforts after the collapse at Moulivakkam.
Many of them were deployed on round-the-clock rescue efforts at Moulivakkam, and had returned to their units only late on Saturday. And within hours, they were back on the field, doing what they are trained to do. “It’s tiring. Till Saturday we were not relieved from the Moulivakkam operation. Just last night we returned to our units and today we were rushed to this spot. But situations like this happen in our profession and we are trained to face them,” said one of the personnel, who was resting in the shade after the rescue operations wrapped up.
The men used concrete cutters and crowbars to recover the bodies from under the debris, after which two earthmovers were used to clear the debris. “Initially we could not use heavy machinery, as it could hurt the trapped people. So we were carefully breaking the wall into pieces and removing them,” said a fireman. The whole operation lasted for about 90 minutes, in which 70 personnel from 10 units of the TNFRS and seven rescue vehicles were involved.
“We were alerted about the collapse around 7:50 am. Within 10 minutes the first rescue vehicle from Red Hills unit reached the spot, closely followed by six other teams from different units in the city. The area was swampy due to rain and it was difficult for us to access it. Initially we thought that there were no survivors, as the collapse happened around 2 am and no one noticed it till 7:30 am. But when we touched a hand between the debris to try and pull the body out, we realised that the person was alive,” said a s nior personnel of TNFRS.
The dead were identified as Pandaiyya (45), Lakshmikantha (35), Jeyammal (65), Cimmathri (40), Semmaiya (45), Jegadheesh (3), Ramu (19), Kondaiah (58), Lakshmi from Andhra and Ajith Mandel (55) and Leema Mandel (40) from Odisha.