Ahmedabad, June 12: The temperature in and around the crashed Air India plane rose to around 1,000 degrees C which made the rescue operation extremely difficult, officials said on Thursday night.
Even dogs and birds at the site could not escape, they said.
A London-bound Air India plane carrying 242 passengers and crew crashed in a residential area in Ahmedabad minutes after taking off from the city airport on Thursday afternoon.
“There was 1.25 lakh litres of fuel inside the plane and it caught fire so it was impossible to save anyone,” Union minister Amit Shah told reporters.
A State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) official said their personnel reached the hostel and residential quarters of doctors and staff members of the BJ Medical College, where the aircraft crashed, between 2 to 2.30 pm.
Before that locals had pulled out some people alive but their teams did not get anybody alive.
A senior fire official said, “As the (aircraft’s fuel) tank exploded it created an inferno where temperature rose to 1,000 degrees Celsius in no time. This left little chance for anyone to escape.”
An SDRF personnel, who joined the force in 2017, said he has handled crisis situations before but has never seen such a disaster.
“We came here with PPE kits. But the temperature was so high that it made operations difficult. There were debris everywhere. So we had to clear the debris that were already simmering,” he said.
The official, who said he was not allowed to speak to the media, claimed his team removed 25-30 bodies including those of children.
“DNA tests will have to be done for recognition of bodies,” he said.
Another SDRF official claimed he lost the count of bodies he removed. “It was so quick that even animals and birds got little time to escape,” he said, pointing to the carcasses of dogs and birds in the residential complex.
Besides passengers and crew members, students in the medical college’s hostels and some others on the premises were among those killed in the tragedy. While police said 265 bodies were brought to the civil hospital, officials were yet to announce the death toll. (PTI)
