Trembling survivors. Anxious waits. The piercing, ominous roar of machines. Miraculous escapes.
Snippets from Garden Reach, where the collapse of an under-construction godown claimed at least five lives. Many feared the toll could rise.
Rescue effort
Rescue workers frequently called out into crevices of mangled metal: “We will save you. Do not be scared.”
NDRF teams, clad in orange jackets and yellow helmets, ferried injured construction workers on stretchers.
The survivors were coated in dust. One of them still clutched a cellphone in his left hand. The ground was wet and slushy from the previous day’s rain, with puddles still remaining. Stone chips, piles of wood, iron rods and construction scrap lay scattered across the site.
Rescue workers struggled to move across the slippery surface. “A dry ground without obstacles would have helped a great deal,” said an NDRF personnel while ferrying the injured between the collapse site and waiting ambulances.
Some survivors occasionally moved a limb. One injured man lifted his hand toward the ambulance window; it trembled briefly before falling back.
The wait
For friends and families of those trapped inside, the wait grew harder by the minute. A woman from Behala Parnasree searched for her cousin, who had been working at the site for seven months. He originally lived in Ranaghat in Nadia and, like several other workers, stayed on-site in makeshift accommodation.
“He spoke to his mother — my maternal aunt — this morning before joining work, as he does every day,” said the woman, who had no news of him even hours after the collapse.
Narrow escape
Vijay Baidhakar, 22, a resident of Dhanbad who worked as a blacksmith at the site, narrowly escaped death after stepping away for lunch just minutes before the collapse.
“Like every day, I reported for work at around 8.30am. Around noon, I went to wash my hands before lunch. The place was inside the compound, about 100 metres from where we were working. As I was heading for lunch, I suddenly heard a deafening sound. When I turned back, I saw the building had collapsed,” Baidhakar said.
Most workers, like Baidhakar, live and eat in temporary shelters — small enclosures made of corrugated tin sheets.
Baidhakar said his 50-year-old uncle was among those trapped. “God saved me today. It could easily have beenme under the rubble. My uncle is still inside, and I don’tknow whether he is alive,” he said.
Faruk Mondal, 30, a daily-wage labourer from Basanti in the Sundarbans, had been assigned work outside the building shortly before the collapse.“One of my supervisors asked me to assemble iron rods lying outside. While I was working, I suddenly saw the entire structure come down before my eyes,” Mondal said, his voice shaking.
Sound of silence
A cacophony of sound marked much of the day — the shrill whine of drilling machines, the snap of crane claws and the heavy thud of sledgehammers.
Around 4.30pm, an NDRF officer ordered all machines shut down immediately. He repeated the instruction multiple times, placing a finger on his lips to signal silence. The pause was necessary as rescue teams believed survivors might be trapped in a specific section of the nearly 6,000 square metre site.
“When rescuers sense people could be trapped in a particular spot, they need to catch even the faintest sound indicating life,” an army jawan said.
The silence lasted around half an hour. In more than four hours Metro spent at the site, such stoppages wereenforced at least twice — around 4.30pm and 6.15pm. Multiple survivors were pulled out following these silent intervals.