30 hours after Burari building collapse, family of four rescued: ‘Ate peanuts, tomatoes to survive’

Since the building collapsed on Monday, 16 people have been rescued and five have been declared dead.

National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and police officials said the rescue operations are expected to conclude on Thursday.

In an FIR registered following a complaint by Lalta Prasad, one of the survivors, it is mentioned that the walls and pillars had started showing cracks.

“I had pointed out the cracks to the builder many times but he just asked some people to apply POP (Plaster of Paris) and hide them…when I told him that the building could collapse and kill people, he told me that he could not put any more money in this building. He told me he didn’t care whether people lived or died,” wrote Prasad in his complaint.

The builder, Yogender Bhati, was arrested from Timarpur on Tuesday and has been booked under BNS sections 105 (culpable homicide), 110 (attempt to commit culpable homicide) and 3(5) (common intent).

Conducting rescue op

The fire department and the police were the first responders on the site when the building collapsed on Monday evening. “Whenever such an incident occurs, the first to rescue people are the survivors and eyewitnesses,” explained Delhi Fire Service chief Atul Garg. “After that, when the fire service and police arrive, we use cutting and lifting tools to remove the debris while the police remove any crowd that has gathered and cordons off the area,” he said.

The police also talk to witnesses and survivors to understand how many people are still in the building. “In this particular case, there was an opening through which we could hear two children crying…one of our men climbed into the hole and pulled them out,” said DCP North Raja Banthia. He added that the first few rescues were done without any safety gear. “We work on the instinct of humanity,” Banthia said.

Meanwhile, the NDRF first conducts an initial assessment by talking to people nearby and survivors to get a rough estimate of the building’s layout and the location of the people trapped under the debris.

“Once the survivors tell us where each person was in the building before it collapsed, we use a victim locating camera…it’s a small camera attached to a bendable pipe. The camera has a light and speaker attached. We have a screen where it feeds the footage…we also use sniffer dogs to locate survivors and bodies,” said NDRF 16th Battalion Second-in-Command, Daulat Ram Chaudhary.

“In this case, the building fell in a pancake pattern, which generally leaves low chances of survival,” he added.