Quake hits Ramzan calm in J-K

As a result, police need to push the crowd to one side to keep the hospital gate open. “But for our repeated intervention, the hospital would be overrun by the mob,” says Sub-Divisional Police Officer Javed Koul who rushed to the hospital with his staff minutes after the first big tremor hit Srinagar at 9.25 am.

“At that time, it was a different scene altogether. All patients, many of them critical, had been brought outside by their attendants. The hospital ground was filled to capacity,” he says.

Elsewhere, the day’s fast had just begun when the ground beneath the faithful’s feet shook. With every tremor, people spilled out of houses, schools and shops to take shelter in the open.

Fear and panic were aggravated by rumours that bigger tremors were in the offing. When the first of the tremors struck the city and adjacent townships around 9.20 am residents thought it to be one of the low-intensity tremors that occur every now and then and stayed inside.

But within seconds windowpanes were shaking, the foundations of buildings shook and roofs crashed.

“It is the first time in my life that I witnessed such a massive earthquake,” Ghulam Mohammad, 65, said. “At first I took this as a normal earthquake. But when the ground shook, I thought all is over and started praying. Now I am so scared I don’t want to return home,” he added.

Bashir Ahmad and his family in Kanlibagh in Baramulla district are similarly scared and have been camping at a school ground nearby since the morning. Riffat, Bashir’s sister, says: “… After every hour, fresh tremors rock our place so we are afraid to go inside… I had a narrow escape.”

The situation inside the Hari Singh hospital is equally grim, with no beds to spare at the emergency ward. Rashid Khan tries to calm his one-and-a-half-year old daughter Hameeda, whose abdomen and left hand are bandaged.

Imran Khan, 16, of Nowpara, Srinagar is writhing in pain on a bed nearby. “He was in school at the time (of the quake). He came running home and fell on the way,” says Mukhtar Ahmad, his cousin.

Constable Riyaz Ahmad, lying on another bed, had to leap from the second floor of the store house in Baramulla police lines. “Moments after I jumped, the building collapsed. I don’t know what happened to my colleagues as I fell unconscious soon after.”