New Delhi: Since Thursday afternoon, Mohit Chavda has been reliving the moment a Boeing Dreamliner crashed into the BJ Medical College mess in Ahmedabad. The 25-year-old had been having lunch when everything blew up. First, there was dust and smoke. Then he heard a big blast.
“There was zero visibility,” he said. Chavda ran outside, but then he and his friends realised that there were still medical students at the mess.
“I called up a few people and we went upstairs again after 10 minutes.” They were trapped in the debris.
“There was a wall, and behind that, a lot of people were eating lunch. That collapsed. We rescued 10-12 people. Most of them were first- and second-year MBBS students. Four-five of them are in the ICU. Around 20 people have injuries such as fractures and scratches,” said Chavda, who is completing his internship after getting his MBBS degree this year.
He’s still in a daze over what happened.
“We called the police, fire, and ambulance,” he said.
According to the BJMC administration, five people from the medical college have died in the crash—four MBBS students and the six-month pregnant wife of a neurosurgery resident.
Search and rescue operations are still underway in Ahmedabad, where Air India flight AI171 crashed shortly after takeoff at 1:39 pm on Thursday. The London-bound flight had 242 people on board, including the crew. The aircraft crashed into the BJMC undergraduate hostel mess in Meghani Nagar.
Every medical student was called to the hospital to help with the emergency and trauma, but some were in the thick of rescuing classmates from the rubble.
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‘It was a fearful sight’
Medical students who had just escaped the blast found themselves turning into first responders.
“We were called at the trauma centre but we were rescuing, so we didn’t go yesterday. Everyone was called at the hospital to help as there are multiple patients there,” Chavda added. “It was so tragic. I don’t think I can forget this in my entire life. I am tired of repeating everything again and again.”
Another student who was part of this student rescue team said that he was a few seconds away from the blast. He pulled his friends out of the debris.
“I was just 40 seconds away from the place where this incident happened. I rushed to help and called my friends for help. I pulled out bodies of the students from the debris—some of them were my friends who were having lunch. We pulled out the cylinders to avoid further blasts. We tried using fire extinguishers, but they weren’t working properly. It was a fearful sight,” he said.
Around 45 students were admitted to the hospital on Thursday and one is still missing, said Dr Parag Lua Jee, who was on duty at the emergency ward when the accident occurred.
“The blast was massive — it completely destroyed the mess building and severely damaged the Super Speciality building as well. Many people inside the Super Speciality building sustained injuries, including burn wounds, though thankfully the undergraduate students did not suffer burn injuries,” he added.
All of Jee’s original documents, certificates, and personal belongings were inside the hostel and got completely ruined in the fire.
“The entire hostel has been gutted. There are five hostels located around the mess, out of which three have been completely burned down. The impact of the explosion was so huge that it caused extensive destruction in just moments. We have been on emergency duty at the hospital since the crash happened, attending to the injured as they keep coming in,” he added.
Dr Rishi Bose, a cousin of one of the doctors who died at the mess, shared his grief on X.
“I’m still in shock. My fingers are trembling, my heart is shattered, my cousin is no more,” he wrote. “He must have been in the hostel mess, sharing dreams with friends, when the Air India crash stole him away. He was supposed to come home last week but stayed back. Now he’ll never return.”
(Edited by Asavari Singh)