The Hindu : Front Page : Eight killed in instances of wall collapse in city

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Mar 05, 2006

Front Page

Front Page

Eight killed in instances of wall collapse in city

Staff Reporter

Two girls and a boy among victims; seven injured

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 walls at three places on city fringes killing eight persons, including two girls and a boy.

In the incident at Pahadi Sharif, six persons were killed and seven others injured. The victims and the 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-foot-high compound wall.

"After the backbreaking digging work, we slept early as usual only to wake up to the cloudburst with deafening thunder 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.

The Pahadi Sharif police, whose building was located a few yards away, rushed to the spot, rescued the injured persons and rushed them to Osmania General Hospital. "So heavy was the rain that even our police station's arch caved in," Ibrahimpatnam ACP Obul Reddy said.

Case booked

The police booked a case of suspicious deaths under section 174 of the Criminal Procedure Code. Ranga Reddy Revenue Divisional Officer (East) Ramulu told The Hindu that the land where the compound wall was erected originally belonged to the Government, but was "assigned to somebody" a few years ago.

Neither the police nor the revenue authorities are sure as to who built the wall with hollow cement bricks for a length of 83 metres. Revenue Department records showed the land had been in possession of one Syed Ahmed Ghouse for the last 10 years.

A fifth standard student Suraj Singh, 10, who was playing inside his house premises, died on the spot when the wall of toilet collapsed on him on Saturday morning at Adityanagar in Miyapur.

Locals said the wall got soaked due to last night's downpour. The parapet wall of a double-storeyed building fell on a tin-roof house killing Prem Singh, 18, and injuring his father Kishan Singh, 40, at Nehrunagar of Chandanagar.

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