27 hours, 7 dead: Rescue operation ends at Delhi hostel collapse site

At 1 am on Monday, rescuers faced a fresh danger at the site of a collapsed boys’ hostel in Delhi’s Satya Niketan: at least five people were still believed to be trapped under the rubble, but removing it risked bringing down the adjoining girls’ hostel.

Personnel from the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) stood atop the debris in the labyrinthine lanes of the Southwest Delhi neighbourhood, working out how to proceed. “If we remove this rubble too quickly, this building could fall,” said an NDRF official, pointing to the part of the debris attached to the adjoining five-floor girls’ hostel.

“This is a girl’s hostel but it doesn’t have any rebar. It has a common wall with this collapsed structure, and was standing mostly on its base. It’s difficult to see how one stands without the other,” the official added.

The boys’ hostel had collapsed about 16 hours earlier. By then, NDRF personnel had pulled out 15 people, five of them dead. But the rescue operation had slowed for more than an hour as teams tried to figure out how to clear the remaining rubble without destabilising the adjoining building.

They drilled holes into the debris to push in oxygen pipes and search for survivors. “We don’t see an end any time soon. It could take one more day to clear everything up,” they said. Civil Defence volunteers, meanwhile, ran around with iron jacks, placing them under the extended first floor of the girls’ hostel to support the structure and allow the rubble removal to continue.

About 100 metres away, three students stood watching the thinning crowd that had gathered at the site since morning. They pointed to the buildings around them and took bets on which one would fall next. “Look at all these buildings.

Aren’t they waiting to fall? It’s not just the building. The shops here, the food they give here. Everything is sub-standard,” fumed Aditya, a third-year student of Delhi University’s Dayal Singh (Evening) College who had been living in the locality till last year.

“I was in a similar paying guest (PG) accommodation here, now they are all being cleared. I dodged a bullet,” added Aditya. He now lives in Katwari Sarai, another cluster of poorly maintained PGs near Hauz Khas in South Delhi.

His friend, Jayant Chowdhary, also a third-year student at Dayal Singh (Evening) College, Jayant blamed the middlemen managing the properties for what Satya Niketan has become. “The area is half a century old. You need proper repair work.

But they will just whitewash the building every year. New clothes for a sick body make no difference.” About 3 am, an NDRF official shouted out. They had found a laptop, a charger and a small pouch in the rubble, all held by an unconscious boy.

The rescuers frantically cleared the debris and pulled him out. But there was no pulse. The boy was taken out on a stretcher in a black body bag. Six hours after the previous rescue, NDRF had found the sixth victim. With the jacks now installed under the adjoining girls’ hostel, rubble removal gathered pace.

Earthmovers began clearing the debris, still cautiously.