Ahmedabad: Ravi Thakor, whose family has been running the hostel mess at the BJ Medical College for 15 years, had just stepped out to make tiffin deliveries to students and staff at the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital with his wife.
It was a busy lunch hour and his mother was hard at work in the hostel mess’s kitchen. Thakor’s five-year-old son had finished his lunch and had left the mess. His wife had put his 2-year-old daughter to sleep next to the toddler’s grandmother in the kitchen, and as such Thakor’s mind was at ease.
He finished his delivery and started walking towards the road leading up to the hostel around 2 pm when he saw dark smoke rising up from the hostel building.
“I thought the building was on fire and I started running towards it, but the authorities stopped me. It was then that the enormity of what had happened struck me,” Thakor told ThePrint.
At 1.38 pm, an Air India flight with a very experienced pilot and co-pilot took off from Ahmedabad’s Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport with 242 passengers, including crew members, intending to travel to London. By 1.40 pm, it had crashed into the hostel building, with thick black smoke blanketing the Meghaninagar neighbourhood, and rising up to settle in the skies across the city.
Thakor’s mother and 2-yr-old daughter have been missing ever since.
The airport’s own fire department was the first to respond, immediately alerting the Fire Control Room of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and sending its own resources too.
The first two fire engines of the Ahmedabad civic body reached the spot at 1.43 pm, Ahmedabad’s Chief Fire Officer Amit Dongare told ThePrint.
Subsequently, a whole army of rescue workers from the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, the city police, the Gujarat State Disaster Response Force, the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) as well as the Central Industrial Security Force descended on the spot, most within the first 30 minutes of the crash.
“We got a call at 2 pm and left immediately. When I got here, I realised this is beyond anything that I have ever seen or handled. This was the worst disaster I have seen,” Mukesh Chaudhary, who is part of the NDRF unit in Vadodara, told ThePrint.
Until now, the worst crisis he had handled was the 2022 Morbi bridge collapse that led to 135 deaths.
Also read: Modest beginnings, big dreams—life stories of the crew members of Air India flight 171
The first few hours
Flights flying low are a staple for Meghaninagar, a middle-class residential cluster of low-storey buildings. The neighbourhood is so close to the airport that every few minutes there is an airplane that flies low above it. The sound of jets is always so close that it’s almost deafening, compelling people to halt conversations.
Eyewitnesses from the locality and rescuers like to speculate that the pilot, in whatever little time he got to react, might have tried to minimise loss of life.
“There’s a large slum cluster nearby. Then there’s also the Ahmedabad civil hospital. Imagine if the plane had hit any of these two structures. The losses would have been much higher,” said an NDRF official at the site who wished to not be named. That aspect, however, can be confirmed only once the investigation is over and there’s clarity on what exactly happened with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner’s flight.
The Ahmedabad fire department got the first call from the airport fire department almost immediately, at 1.40 pm.
The Naroda fire station, which is close by, was alerted and two fire engines were dispatched to the spot immediately, Chief Fire Officer Dongare said.
“When it was evident that it was a plane crash at a residential locality, we diverted every single resource of the Ahmedabad fire department towards the incident, and then some more,” he added.
Ahmedabad has 19 fire stations, all of which were activated to tackle the disaster. Altogether, they dispatched 65 vehicles to the spot. However, the scope of the disaster was such that civic officials thought even the strength of the entire Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation could be insufficient.
“We requested the state government to supplement our efforts. Accordingly, the government got another 40 fire engine vehicles to the site from the Vadodara Municipal Corporation. The state government also helped us arrange for 50 ambulances to be stationed at the spot,” Dongare said.
SDRF teams from Ahmedabad were also at the spot by 2 pm, scourging the debris for any sign of life that could be saved.
“There was a lot of confusion. There were so many bodies strewn around the spot and parts of the plane had been crushed to the ground,” Dharmendra Prajapati, an Ahmedabad-based SDRF official, said to ThePrint.
The NDRF sent six teams to the spot from Gandhinagar and Vadodara. The teams from Vadodara were notified by about 2 pm and were at the spot by 3.30 pm, NDRF personnel at the site told ThePrint.
“When we reached the spot, the smoke was so thick even in the lane leading up to the site that it felt like we were looking through a veil. Inside, even some trees had been burnt to the ground. It felt like it would be a miracle if we manage to pull someone out alive,” said Dnyaneshwar Shinkar, an NDRF personnel from Vadodara.
Shinkar and Chaudhary said the rescue workers who had reached the spot immediately after the crash had already pulled out some bodies from the wreckage. But, after they got there, within the next hour itself, they pulled 91 mostly charred bodies out.
The rescue
While the rescue teams attempted to recover bodies from the debris, they also focussed on rescuing people from the buildings around the site of the crash.
In the first few hours, officials’ teams rescued 30 people from eight buildings—the hostel building, residential buildings and a canteen—around the crash site. Casualties from the buildings were also moved to the hospital and the debris was simultaneously cleared.
The Junior Doctors’ Association at the BJ Medical College released a statement Saturday that a total of four MBBS students who were having lunch in the hostel mess died in the incident. Twenty others were injured in the accident Thursday. Of these, 11 have been discharged and are in a stable condition.
There were family members of super speciality doctors staying in the Atulyam building. Of these, four lost their lives.
Additionally, the wife of one resident doctor from the super speciality department is injured. All the injured persons are recovering quickly and their condition is currently stable, the statement said.
By 12 am, a bulk of the work was over. Bodies of passengers and, in many cases, body parts, had been pulled out of the debris and the rescuers called it a night.
A little before that, they also started building barricades to keep anyone not directly associated with the rescue work out.
At 6 am Friday morning, the rescue work began in full swing once again. At 8.30 am, Prime Minister Narendra Modi reached the spot to oversee the rescue efforts.
Post that, the teams did one more recce of the eight buildings and the canteen around the site just to be doubly sure that there was no one stranded there, officials said.
The day after
As of Friday morning, the shattered plane was still on top of the damaged building of BJ Medical College.
Dongare said there were two aspects to the rescue work on Friday. One, recovery of the black box, and second, investigation.
The black box was said to be recovered later on Friday.
Multiple agencies visited the site to investigate the accident Friday, right from the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, the Gujarat Anti Terror Squad, the National Investigation Agency, as well as investigators from the UK and the US.
“Since a number of agencies are investigating possible causes, we will preserve the site for the next 24 to 48 hours,” Dongare said.
Meanwhile, at the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital, the mammoth exercise of taking DNA samples from the bodies recovered was underway most of Friday. Ambulances lined up before the morgue of the 1,200-bed hospital, loading bodies to take them a few metres away to freeze them for the next 72 hours till the DNA results are back. The sheer number of casualties meant this exercise continued well into Friday night.
Amid all this, through the day, Thakor, kept shuttling between the hospital and the site of the crash, hoping for news and praying for it to not be the worst.
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)
Also read: What could have gone wrong? A pilot & an ex-crew member reflect on AI 171 crash & rules of takeoff