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Journalism of Courage
BHARATPUR, APRIL 29: After more than 24 hours, the fire at the ordnance depot in Bharatpur is yet to be fully brought under control. About 300 projectiles have already exploded `outside’ the depot and the Army has retrieved about 200 from the debris.
There were six fire tenders here on Friday when the fire began at 3 pm. Today there were only two left. And even as a court of inquiry has been ordered to establish the reasons for the fire, there is not much evidence left. If a short-circuit had caused the fire, there is no word on what had happened to the circuit-breaker or fuses.
According to one official, if the fuses were rendered non-operational, it had to be done through the computers. The computers have melted down in the the fire and the evidence, if any, has been lost.
About 20 villages had been listed for evacuation, including the main town of Bharatpur. Only 12 were evacuated till this afternoon and the rest were being taken to camps set up in schools and guest-houses in Mathura.
There is a logic behind listing particular villages for evacuation. The projectiles stored at the depot, especially the surface-to-air missiles, are tilted in a particular direction. This makes all the villages in the direction of Bharatpur town, the railway station and the Hindustan Petroleum storage area en route to the Mathura refinery vulnerable.
It was painful to watch the 155-mm and 130-mm surface-to-air missiles, which were a vital part of our air defence, take off at the frequency of one every 15 minutes. At night they looked like smouldering arrows of fire disappearing into the darkness and in the light of the day the devastation was too widespread and heart-rending.
The Raj Bahadur Memorial Hospital in Bharatpur has three dead in its mortuary, two from Bharatpur and one from the village of Ludhavi. Two of the dead have been identified as Arjun Das of Bharatpur and Vinod Kumar of Ludhavi which falls in the Bharatpur sanctuary periphery.
The rockets have also injured two persons — 50-year-old Sukhmani Devi and 23-yar-old Laxmi Narayan Sharma. “I was sleeping in by house,” says Sharma, a resident of Bharatpur, “suddenly I heard this big crash and I thought the roof had collapsed. Then shrapnel tore through the wall and fell on me.” He left leg is injured. According to locals, many have been injured but they have gone off to hospitals in Mathura and Agra.
Interestingly, when asked how long the fire could last, a Defence official who didn’t wish to be quoted said, “None of us have gone anywhere near the place where it is really happening. It (the depot) is all engulfed in fire and there is no opening to check it.”
Another engineer, Sergeant Bharadwaj of the Indian Air Force, said, “We can only let them take their time in blasting off. We cannot do anything more, we are doing our best but it is not good enough.”
What caused the fire? According to a labourer working at a building inside the depot, the fire began at the back entrance. “There is a lot of long dry grass there. Two or three wooden boxes have been lying there in the grass for some days. The fire started when the boxes blew up.” The back entrance of the depot is closer to the missile store than the front entrance, from where the dump is about 4 km away.
The labourer is not sure who kept the boxes there but Defence personnel dismiss the subject, saying it was part of their own grenade consignment which had to be taken inside but was waiting outside for a while.
