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| TWIN REALITIES: Residents of the South City towers felt the full impact of the quake and were urged to evacuate. They rushed to the ground floor in panic and waited for close to an hour before heading back home. Among them was Tapan Ghosh (top, foreground), who stays on the 28th floor, and was having a “relaxed cup of tea” when he felt his “head spinning and teacup shaking”. Barely 50 steps away, in the adjoining South City Mall, the only tremor being felt was from the shoppers’ footfall. With 15 days to go for Durga Puja, the mall chock-a-block with shoppers (below) reflected none of the Richter panic gripping the residents next door. Pictures by Sanat Kumar Sinha |
Calcuttans pressed the panic button as the ground beneath their feet shook for 60 seconds on Sunday evening in what was the strongest earthquake to rock the city since 1964.
Patients scurried down hospital corridors, residents of highrises scrambled for the nearest exit and families of police personnel living in an Ultadanga complex watched in horror as chunks of concrete came off a 10-storey building during the tremors from 6.10pm.
A man trapped in an elevator going down the 26th floor of South City’s Tower 2 said he felt the lift “swinging like a pendulum, almost hitting the walls of the shaft”. Businessman Sabir Azhari realised it was a strong earthquake and not “some cable fault” the moment he got off.
Some like Tolly star Dev’s domestic help just froze. “He called me on my cellphone and started crying. He said everything in the house was shaking…. I was in Golf Green at a music recording and did not feel anything. I asked him to quickly go down to the ground floor…. I am a little scared to go back home now. I hope and pray everyone is safe,” said the actor, who stays in a 24th-floor apartment in South City.
If life in the time of an earthquake was scary in the tallest residential towers of the city, residents of the police housing complex in Ultadanga braced for the worst as the tremors struck.
Gautam Mahato was on the 10th floor terrace with friends when he suddenly felt dizzy. “I wondered why my head was spinning. At that very moment, my wife called to say it was an earthquake and that she was headed downstairs with our son,” recounted Mahato, who sprinted towards the staircase.
His neighbour on the fifth floor, Dilip Kumar Roy, jumped out of bed to find multiple cracks on the walls and ceiling, including one two feet long. “I felt numb and my wife started screaming,” the sub-inspector said.
By the time the tremors stopped, the staircases and the ground were littered with cement plaster that had come off some of the 10 buildings in the complex, all 10 to 11 storeys tall. “The elevators had stopped working and the staircase was littered with concrete. As I hurried down the stairs from the ninth floor, I feared the building would crumble,” said Dolly Nandi.
A fire brigade team reached the complex soon after and advised residents of the damaged portions to vacate their flats immediately.
In several city hospitals, patients panicked as screams of “earthquake...earthquake” rent the air. “There was panic on the sixth and seventh floors after the tremors were felt, but things were brought under control soon,” said Rupak Barua, the chief operating officer of CMRI.
At Apsara Apartment, on Park Street, a mother and her year-old son were thrown off the bed. “It happened so suddenly that I have no idea how I landed on the ground. My son has been crying since,” said homemaker Kirti Kiswani.
Class IX student Karanvir Singh was playing table tennis with a friend on the 11th floor when the earthquake hit. “I struggled to keep my balance. I looked at my friend and both of us knew this was no mild earthquake,” he said.
Eye surgeon Vivek Verma said residents didn’t return to their flats until half an hour after the tremors stopped. “All of us are still a little jittery.”
The Chhajar family, which lives on the 16th floor of Ankur Building on Lord Sinha Road, was having tea together when the tremors started. Their chairs shook and two stationary ceiling fans started swinging.
“It still didn’t cross my mind that we were experiencing an earthquake. When it sank in, we rushed downstairs,” said Rajesh Chhajar, a resident of the apartment building for 30 years.
Chhajar’s mother Vimla Devi started chanting hymns as she held on to her son.
Siddhartha Roy, a 46-year-old teacher working in Tura, Meghalaya, is used to tremors in the Northeast several times a year. But when he felt Sunday’s earthquake sitting in his 12th floor flat at Genexx Valley in Joka, it did seem odd to him that Calcutta could be jolted by an earthquake this strong. “When I realised that the building was indeed swaying, I just waited for it to pass,” said Roy, in town for a medical check-up.
Subrata Banerjee, on the 32nd floor of South City’s Tower 2, was Net surfing when he felt the computer table shake violently. “As we are so high up, we could feel the whole building shaking vigorously,” he said, relieved the ordeal didn’t last long.
Sangeeta Gupta, whose flat is on the 14th floor of Tower 4, said the residents would need to speak to the complex management “about our safety in such circumstances”.
My cup of tea, kept on a tray on the bed, spilled over
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Amit Sen, film director and ad film-maker, looks down on the city like no other Calcuttan. For he lives on the 35th floor of Tower 3 of South City, which happens to be the topmost residential floor in town. On Sunday evening, that was not the best place to be
It was around 6.10 in the evening. I was sitting in my room having tea when I suddenly started feeling giddy. I felt like I was swaying, my head was spinning and I wasn’t being able to fathom what was happening.
The first alarm call came when my cup of tea, kept on a tray on the bed, spilled over. The bed kept trembling like crazy. The shaking got more and more intense. I have a fetish for masks and have a lot of them mounted on the wall of my living room. Three of them fell off the hook and came crashing to the ground; one of them broke.
That’s when I realised it must be an earthquake. Since mine is the topmost floor, the swaying must have been the maximum.
We have a public address system over which the security guard had started urging evacuation. I dashed out barefoot with my younger son and two maids and headed for the lift. I don’t have any fear psychosis but coming down the lift I must admit I felt a bit scared. My eight-year-old son started crying as the lift kept banging against the wall on its way down and for me it was like reliving all my Hollywood film experiences.
We assembled in the lawn as people from all the other towers thronged there. After a while our security team came and gave us the green signal to get back home.
The last time I had such an experience was six years back in Assam but nothing like this. This seemed like a really big one. Thankfully, nothing serious happened and none of us was injured.
(As told to Mohua Das)
