Ahmedabad plane crash: Lunchtime on June 12
For the hostellers and students of B J Medical College, the sound of airplanes roaring overhead was nothing unusual. Until one flew too close.
On June 12, an Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner flight carrying 242 people to London Gatwick Airport, went down moments after it took off from Ahmedabad airport at 1.38 pm, killing 241 of those on board. As it plunged with a vertical speed of 475 feet per minute, its tail first struck the college's Atulyam hostel mess, where students had turned up for lunch, turning the first-floor dining room into a jumble of twisted concrete and leaving at least four medical students and the wife of a doctor dead. Around 20 students were wounded, five of them critically.
The hostel is at a distance of around a kilometre from the Sardar Vallabhai Patel International Airport, the two complexes separated by the Ahmedabad cantonment area. Since it fell on the flight path, one of the favourite pastimes for students was to stand on the roof, look up at the belly of the flying planes and guess the airlines, the aircraft type, the model, says a former student.
'We could even see the landing gear being brought out before the planes touched down on the runway and the flaps opening when the flights took off. When we had nothing to do, we would go to the roof for some plane spotting,' says the former student.
He says he once saw an Air India flight trying to touch down six times, circling back each time, before it landed successfully. 'We were used to conversations being interrupted by the sound of aircraft,' he says, explaining why there may have been nothing to alert the students in the mess and the hostels about the approaching aircraft.
When the tail hit the building, bringing down a wall and engulfing the mess in a cloud of smoke and dust, some managed to run, others got stuck.
A little past 1.30 pm, Meena Mistry, a cook at the Atulyam hostel mess, reprimanded a few stragglers who walked into the mess. 'Lunch time starts at 12.30 pm, but some of them came late and I scolded them,' she recalls.
She and the other cooks were making rotis for the 25-30 students in the mess when disaster struck. 'Initially, I thought that one of the cooking cylinders had exploded. But when a wall of fire came towards me, I realised it was a major accident. I ran for my life,' she says.
'A part of the plane crashed into the hand wash area. While many students were trapped, others ran out of the building. I ran too. It was so dark we couldn't see anything. When we reached down, the entire plane was burning.'
Apart from the students, there were at least 13 women workers in the dining hall. At least one of them, Sarla, and her infant grandchild, have been missing since the incident. 'Sarla maasi and her granddaughter are still missing. When the baby's parents go to deliver tiffins to doctors at the hospital, they leave the baby in the mess. Maasi's son is still looking for them.'
With 250 MBBS students and 400 students in 24 postgraduate branches, B J Medical College is one of the oldest in the state. The medical college is part of the 110-acre Civil Hospital 'Medicity' campus.
Said to be the biggest medical complex in Asia, the campus houses many other institutions, including the Institute of Kidney Diseases and Research Centre, U N Mehta Heart Hospital, Dental & Cancer Hospital, TB Hospital and Paraplegia Hospital. The mess and the hostel blocks are the buildings closest to the airport. Adjacent to the mess are four hostels — all for superspecialty postgraduates, some staying with their partners.
The two-storeyed mess, with dining spaces on both floors, usually offers a no-frills, middle-of-work meal with dal, rice and rotis. Students say while most of them opt for the mess food when they join and pay for it as part of their fees, it is mostly frequented by undergraduate students.
'Postgraduate students usually work 24×7 or have no fixed timings, with all the bedside rounds and classes. So they prefer eating their tiffins in the hospital itself, whenever they get some time. Most of them would smuggle a hotplate to their rooms and cook some basic food since they would never make it in time for the canteen lunch and dinner. But the first- and second-year MBBS students at least get to eat on time at the canteen,' says the former student.
On June 12 too, most of the students at the mess were undergraduate students. 'Unfortunately, the incident happened bang in the middle of lunch hour. Had it taken place before 1 or post 2 pm, hardly anyone would have been there. Had the flight gone any further, he says, it would have hit the 1,200-bed hospital on campus,' says a warden.
Jeet Bhuriya, 18, was among those who turned up late for lunch that day. A first-year MBBS student, he and his friends had just reached the mess when the plane crashed into the building, burying them under a debris of concrete and steel. 'As soon as we reached the ground floor of the mess hall, the ceiling collapsed on us. I don't remember what happened after that. I was told four students carried me to the trauma centre,' says Jeet, who suffered head and leg injuries, and is undergoing treatment at the adjoining civil hospital.
At his home in Dahod, Gujarat, his father Govindbhai Narubhai says, 'We are lucky he made it out alive.'
Ritesh Kumar Sharma, a second-year student from Bihar, was in the mess on the first floor when the plane crashed, a friend says. He was taken to the civil hospital. Nikul, another second-year student, was riding to the mess with his friends when he saw black smoke rising in swirls just ahead. 'They tried to run for cover, but all three suffered burns,' says Nikul's uncle Rameshbhai Chaudhary.
Metres away from the mess are the four hostel blocks that bore the brunt of the crash, charred and covered in soot from the fire that engulfed the fallen aircraft. A postgraduate student, 23, says he was sleeping in his fifth-floor hostel room when the plane crashed.
'I was on night shift and slept around 10 am. A few hours later, I heard a blast. Within seconds, I could smell smoke. I rushed out of the building and saw fire in the mess building. It was difficult to make sense of anything. I rushed to the hospital along with others,' says the student. In some time, those who suffered injuries too were brought to the hospital.
A day after the crash, wardens have been assigned to ensure that students go back to their rooms to retrieve their belongings, and vacate the premises. The wardens said the students were being relocated to other hostels for now. College authorities said that the students have been asked to take some time off to recover from the traumatic incident.
'We doctors are used to seeing all kinds of emergency situations. But this is unlike anything we have seen,' says a doctor.
Input from Parimal Dabhi
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