with som many goods, here is something bad
Towers collapse: a botched rescue operation
** By Qudssia Akhlaque**
ISLAMABAD, Oct 16: Anger, anguish and disillusionment. These were the sentiments expressed by various volunteers conducting the search and rescue operations at the site of capital’s ill- fated Margalla Towers here in the last three days.
Most of these volunteers, young professionals and students, had rushed to the site minutes after the building collapsed and are still there, working tirelessly round-the-clock. Among them are doctors, helpers and trained rescue workers from Karachi’s civil defence.
Many people could have been saved, was their common outcry as they looked on helplessly at heavy-duty bulldozers and excavators ruthlessly clearing the rubble containing dead bodies and limbs on Sunday.
By now a large part of the rubble has been cleared and the operation is expected to end within the next 48 hours.
Over the last six days only dead bodies and limbs have been pulled out, some awfully decomposed and others beyond recognition. The death toll has now risen to 66. According to the official figure some eight people are reported missing but volunteers suspect that more may still be trapped in the car park that was in the basement.
The British rescue team left on Sunday and now only local volunteers are left behind.
On the eleventh day of the operation, now almost reduced to a clean-up exercise, these selfless volunteers were full of complaints and lament at the callous way the entire operation had been conducted. One by one they poured their hearts out, all bitterly critical of the role of the men in khaki and police force deployed there.
Many of them resented the fact that they were repeatedly prevented from taking the plunge into the rubble and combing through it for survivors. A young enthusiastic volunteer, Safdar Hashmi, who had brought out the first survivor, a Japanese woman, was particularly upset about it.
“They were more interested in going ahead with those killing machines than saving lives,” said an agitated volunteer on Sunday who literally had tears in his eyes. An equally disturbed volunteer, a federal engineering college student, said “they are messing it all up, there is no method to their madness.”
Another disgruntled volunteer said rather helplessly: “They are crushing the bodies inside the rubble with those machines and no one can stop them.”
Feroze Khan, a fire fighter from Karachi with 22 years of experience in search and rescue operations, who came here on his own initiative along with nine others, said it was criminal the way the rubble was cleared.
“They should have first lifted the slabs step by step with the cranes that were parked there instead of using cutters, digging in the concrete and hammering it down,” he said, pointing to the poor planning. These comments were an echo of the observations of three American experts who visited the site last week. Reportedly, one of them, shocked at the sight of the colossal machines on top of the debris digging so merciless, shouted: “What are these monkeys doing?”
Feroze Khan said his advice was ignored and he was abruptly told that the army engineering corps was capable of dealing with it. There were no takers for his plea that a professional rescue worker was better poised to save lives than army engineers whose expertise were building roads, bridges and blasting mountains.
Another professional rescue worker from Karachi pointed out that the incessant hammering compressed the concrete and closed the few openings that were there. “Many people must have died of suffocation as a consequence of this,” he added.
He asserted lives were also lost because of sheer mismanagement, saying there were good chances of bringing more people out alive as some children had been pulled out of the rubble alive in northern areas even after eight nine days.
A civil defence rescue worker who flew in from Karachi at his own cost on the second day of the disaster recounted the world record of a survivor pulled out of the rubble after eleven days in China.
Volunteers Waqas and Haroon said the officials of the engineering corps who supervised the operation turned a deaf ear to desperate pleas for halting the machines on many occasions when they detected voices of survivors from little openings in the rubble. At least two volunteers talked of a lady whose voice they had heard. She had reportedly signalled that she was OK and trying to make way for herself.
According to volunteers they had detected several other survivors who could not be brought out because a lot of time was wasted due to mismanagement of the commanding officers.
A doctor working for PIMS, who did not want to be named, disclosed that at one point an army officer approached her with a naked hand of some victim that he had picked from the rubble and asked her not to mention it to anyone and take it straight to the hospital. “I was furious and told him to show some respect and at least wrap it in a piece of cloth,” the doctor said.
**
“It is a pity that once the bodies of officials and well- connected individuals were brought out, all interest in others was diminished,” is how one volunteer put it.
**
Dr Naureen Malik, who has been at the site since day one said: “I had never ever imagined in my life that I would be asking people for so many kafans (funeral shrouds).”
http://www.dawn.com/2005/10/19/nat4.htm
strange isn’t it. with so many volunteers and some even professionals, their help and advice was not asked at all.