‘Had planned b’day bash, saw heaps of bodies’
EVENING NIGHTMARE Labourer relives horror amid search for two friends feared to be trapped inside the illfated plant No 6
UNCHAHAR (RAE BARELI): Ram Prakash, a labourer attached with the plant number 1, is haplessly searching for his friends, Nanku and Pappu, who were on duty at the plant number 6 of the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), Ltd, where a boiler exploded on Wednesday evening, killing 18 and injuring around 100 persons.
The frantic search, both at Rae Bareli district hospital and Jeevan Jyoti hospital on the NTPC premises, however, brought no success to the 35-year-old resident of Laxmipur Bazar, around 12-km away from here.
“We had planned a small gettogether this evening as it was Nanku’s birthday today. Pappu had to cook non-veg delicacies for all three of us,” he tells HT, while hoping we could help find his friends.
“Both of them have come from Bihar’s Samastipur area but I don’t have their exact address or contact numbers to inform their families,” he rues while reminiscing the day they met. “We became friends from the word go.”
Puzzled as he looks, in seconds, he starts screaming about what he saw minutes before.
“I saw heaps of dead bodies, badly burnt bodies. There were cries for help when I reached the spot almost 15 minutes after the incident,” he says.
“It was horrible. I saw labourers dying while being taken to ambulances. I haven’t seen such a tragic incident ever in my life,” says Prakash, who like hundreds of other daily wagers get Rs 200 for per day for the job.
“Working in a plant, especially those which are close to boiler is always dangerous. But there is no other option for us but to work for our daily bread,” he says.
“It was risky to work on the plant as it was made operational only a month ago and we had this intuition that things were not safe,” said another eye-witness Dinesh Kaushal, who had, luckily, refused to work on the plant when the contractor had approached him.
He claimed that authorities had to use JCB machines to drag out the bodies.
Not just labourers, officials on the spot fear that some senior NTPC officials too were reportedly trapped in the fire.
“I saw a few officers crying for help when the fire broke out in the plant, and I didn’t see them coming out of the plant thereafter,” Nalin Singh, another eye witness told HT at the Jeevan Jyoti Hospital.
TOLL MAY GO UP
Though the state government confirmed 20 deaths, eye-witnesses say numbers could be much more.
“The toll might quickly increase,” additional director general (law and order) Anand Kumar told Hindustan Times.