The Hindu : Front Page : Two girls among six killed in wall collapse

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Sunday, Mar 05, 2006

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Front Page

Two girls among six killed in wall collapse

Staff Reporter

Seven persons injured; all belong to villages in Nalgonda district

GRIEF-STRICKEN : Relatives of the six persons, who died in wall collapse at Pahadi Sharif, waiting to receive the bodies at Osmania mortuary in Hyderabad on Saturday.

HYDERABAD: An unusual heavy downpour late on Friday night led to the collapse of a compound wall killing six persons, including two girls, at Pahadi Sharif on the city fringes.

All the victims and seven other injured persons, hailing from interior villages of Nalgonda district, were engaged by a contractor to dig soil for laying telephone cables.

Some 25 families of such labourers had erected temporary huts in the open land abutting the seven-feet-high compound wall.

"After the backbreaking digging work, we slept early as usual only to wake up to the cloudburst with deafening thunders a little before midnight," said Durgamma, whose granddaughter Venkatramanamma, 12, died on the spot. While the winds began to shake the huts, the midnight shower of hailstones made it difficult for the labourers to immediately shift to a safer place.

"I was waking up my granddaughter when the compound wall, 4 feet away, came crashing down and the child was buried alive in front of my eyes," cried the old woman. Another couple-- Punnamma, 45, and her husband Yeddaiah, 50-- and their granddaughter Hemalata, 6, were buried alive in their sleep. Mysaiah, 18, Durgamma's nephew, and Yellamma, 30, too were trapped in the debris and died within seconds.

Utter confusion prevailed for the next one hour as it was pitch dark and rainwater soon increased to knee-level. "With utensils, clothes and property being washed away, we could neither rescue those trapped in the debris nor console ourselves," the labourers said.

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