Flats collapse in Gurugram society; 1 dead, search on for others

GURUGRAM: The living room floor of an apartment on the sixth storey of a housing society collapsed on Thursday evening, setting off a cascading effect in which all the living rooms till the second floor of the building caved in, with the debris heaping on the first floor, leaving one person dead.

At least three others were believed to be trapped in the debris and rescue operations were on at the society, Chintels Paradiso in Sector 109, at the time of writing this report.

A National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) team and the fire brigade were jointly conducting the rescue. Sniffer dogs were deployed too. The resident who died is a woman in her 50s, whose identity had not been confirmed.

Chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar tweeted, “Administrative officials, along with SDRF and NDRF teams, are busy in the rescue & relief work after the unfortunate collapse of the apartment roof at the Paradiso Housing Complex in Gurugram. I am personally monitoring the situation and I pray for everyone’s safety.”

According to residents, no one was living in the sixth-floor apartment of 18-storey Tower 4, D block, where the cave-in originated and the family in the fifth-floor flat right below was away. The flats in the line of the cave-in on the fourth and the third floors are unoccupied.

A bureaucrat, according to residents, lives in the first floor flat with his wife. Both of them were trapped under rubble as all the concrete structures fell in a heap on the first floor. The collapse did not continue into the ground floor.

DCP (west) Deepak Saharan said the rescue operation is in progress. It is too early to say anything. We are trying to rescue the people who are trapped inside,” he said.

Yatharth was with his mother and grandmother in the second floor flat when the roof came crashing down. He said his mother was still trapped. “There was a loud thud. For a moment, I thought the elevator had collapsed. My grandmother pulled me into the balcony in the nick of time, else I too would have come under the debris,” a distraught Yatharth said.
A witness said a woman who was trapped on the first floor was evacuated by residents by fashioning a rope from a bedsheet through the balcony.

Three ambulances were sent by the health department to the society around 7pm when they got information about the cave-in. According to health department officials, among those trapped under the debris is a 50-year-old man who was given first aid and IV drip.

Residents said repair work was on in the sixth-floor flat. The society has 530 flats and nearly 420 families have been staying there for the past four years. The project was launched in 2011 and possession of flats started in 2017.

Residents said in July last year, a ceiling collapsed in the H block of the society. No one was injured that time.

Residents claimed to have made complaints to the town and country planning department, which has directed a structural audit. DTCP director DTCP KM Pandurang said a detailed inquiry has been ordered and action will be taken as per the report.

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