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Nineteen-year-old Dhruv Gujjar, an undergraduate student of Ahmedabad’s BJ Medical College, was having lunch on the ground floor of a mess in the college on Thursday, when he heard a loud crash.
He looked up to see portions of the ceiling falling down. He immediately hid under the table. After a few moments, he saw others fleeing the building.
“I ran out too,” Gujjar told Scroll. “When we came out, we realised that a plane had crashed on the roof.”
On Thursday, barely a minute after Air India flight AI171 took off from Ahmedabad at 1.38 pm, it crashed down in Meghani Nagar, a densely populated residential area bordering Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International airport.
The Boeing 787 Dreamliner was headed for London Gatwick. Of those on board, 169 were Indian nationals, 53 British, seven Portuguese and one was a Canadian national. So far, 204 bodies have been found at the crash site.
Gujjar, a second-year medical student at BJ Medical College and Civil Hospital, had walked into the mess at 1.30 pm along with three other students. “A few first-year students were sitting at a table next to ours,” he said.
The hostel mess for undergraduate students, a two-storey building, is part of a complex of several buildings housing students and faculty of BJ Medical College in Meghani Nagar.
The mess is about 5 km from the international airport. Gujjar said they are used to hearing the boom of aircraft flying overhead every day.
“The noise that we heard today was nothing different,” he said. “Planes fly very low due to our proximity to the airport. But then there was a loud crash that I could hear from the ground floor/”
The ground floor and the first floor of the mess have a seating capacity of over 300. Gujjar said that while there were about 20 to 25 students on the ground floor, he is uncertain of the number who were on the first floor.
The crash was followed by a gas cylinder exploding on the first floor of the mess. The roof of the first floor had come crashing down, which trapped many students, said Gujjar.
When they ran out, Gujjar said he saw the tail-end of the aircraft jutting out from the roof of the mess. The rear of the aircraft, he said, crashed on the roof of the mess. The cockpit and half of the front portion of the plane crashed into a six-storey building next to the mess.
“There is a narrow lane separating that building from the mess,” Gujjar said.
The six-storey building is the staff quarters for doctors working in the UN Mehta Institute of Cardiology and Research Centre, a hospital functioning under the BJ Medical College.
The building was also home to the families of the doctors. It is unclear how many people were in the building at the time of the crash. Gujjar said the fuel tank of the aircraft probably exploded when it hit the residential building. The fire gutted the entire six-storey structure.
Gujjar said that a few junior students were injured when the ceiling collapsed. He rushed them to the trauma ward.
Krish Dabhoya, a final-year student at the medical college, said he left the mess 10 minutes before the disaster. “If the plane had crashed at 1 pm, the entire mess would have been full and the casualties would have been much more,” he told Scroll. “By 1.30, several students had left.”
Dabhoya said many students are feared trapped in the debris on the first floor of the mess. “We are counting students who live in hostel and checking for missing students,” he said. “There are many who got injured and are being treated.”
He added: “The building where the doctors live is completely burnt. There was no time to rescue those living on upper floors.”
Dabhoya suggested that five medical students had died in the crash. Dr Dharmesh Patel, head of the forensic department and deputy dean at the hospital, refused to comment on the number of medical students who died.
Students in the hospital lined up to donate blood after the count of the injured rose. Dr Rohan Krishnan, the chief patron of the Federation of All India Medical Association Doctors Association, said it has been difficult to establish the identities of the dead because of burn injuries.
“About 50 medical students are admitted to the hospital,” Krishnan told mediapersons. “We need blood to treat them.”
This article first appeared on Scroll.in
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