Rescuers fear many children still trapped

Press, 4 May 1988, Page 10

Rescuers fear many children still trapped

NZPA-AP • New Delhi Rescue workers yesterday resumed searching for up to 50 people trapped in the wreckage of a chllrens hospital which collapsed in the northern state of Kashmir, killing at least 14. . ;? The State-run All India Radio said that 23 people, most of them children, were injured when the threestorey brick wing collapsed into the basement on Monday. Structural defects were blamed. Rescue workers said 50 more people may be trapped in the wreckage in Jammu, Kashmir’s winter capital. Most of the injured were being treated at a makeshift emergency centre set up in a hostel • normally used to house visiting political leaders, the radio reported. Most of the dead and injured were found on the top floor of the building. Police and rescue workers fear that many children and hospital workers were trapped on lower floors. The “Statesman” newspaper reported that four wards were in the four-year-old wing which had collapsed. Each ward had 17 beds and some contained more than one child. In addition to hospital staff, parents and relatives were visiting some of the children, the paper said. . The hospital wing collapsed at 6.30 a.m. (local time) in Jammu, a city of 500,000 people about 550 km north of New Delhi. Telephone links with the region are not good and reports have been slow to reach the capital. Late yesterday, rescue workers said the moans of trapped children grew fainter in spite of oxygen being pumped into the debris in the hope of sustaining survivors. “There are fewer and fewer signs of life,’ one official said. “It is a terrible sight up here,” said Arun Joshi, a reporter for the “Kashmir Times.” “No-one knows how many children have died or are dying.”