Ahmedabad: On Thursday afternoon, Dharmendra Prajapati who works with the Gujarat State Disaster Response Force in its Ahmedabad unit saw an ominous thick black smoke blanketing the sky outside his office.
“I knew then something was wrong. Initially, I thought it must have been a blast—some
cylinder blast somewhere. Then I slowly gathered what happened from the news, and then I got a call at 1.30 pm. Our team reached here by 1.45 pm,” Prajapati told ThePrint.
It took a while for him to grasp the enormity of the situation. A London-bound Air India flight had crashed right in the middle of Meghaninagar, a residential area, soon after take off in what is now said to be one of the deadliest accidents in aviation history.
Of the 242 people on board the aircraft, including crew members, only a British national of Indian origin survived the accident. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed right on a hostel of the BJ Medical College.
“There was a lot of confusion. There were so many bodies strewn around and parts of the plane had been crushed to the ground,” Prajapati said, adding that 62 people from his team were deployed at the crash site to go through the debris.
Prajapati and his team members worked until midnight, by which, he said, most of the plane debris had been cleared. “The JCBs are doing their work now.”
By 10 am on Friday morning, the rescue operation was still underway and Prajapati and his colleagues were standing outside on standby.
Hari Om Gupta, a senior official of the NDRF, told reporters that six teams from the National Disaster Response Force were on the site. “The rescue operation is still underway. We are still clearing the debris,” he said.
Another NDRF official ThePrint spoke to said the teams have thoroughly searched the site of the crash. They are now checking the buildings around the affected area, he said.
Meghaninagar, the affected site, is a thick densely populated residential cluster, mostly of two- and three-storeyed houses and buildings.
Nitin Joshi, a 63-year-old resident of the area, had walked up the road to the now cordoned off crash site on Friday morning. “I regularly come here for a morning walk,” he said.
Recounting Thursday’s crash, Joshi said, “We were at home and heard a massive sound, it sounded like a big blast. We then saw very dark smoke which engulfed the entire area. The sound of the blast could be heard from more than 1 km away. We first went to our building roof and then also came to the crash site.”
(Edited by Tony Rai)