Morbi bridge collapse: Inspired by Thailand cave rescue ops, officials drain river to find missing bodies

The rescue operation for the Morbi cable bridge collapse in Gujarat is still underway as the officials are yet to retrieve two bodies of the missing since the incident occurred on October 31.

So far, 134 have been declared dead even as instances of loopholes and mismanagement on the part of the company that repaired the 150-year-old bridge have come to the fore.

The last body was found on Monday, and since then, rescue teams have been scrambling to find the missing ones in the Machchu river. At least 40 boats have been pressed into service and a specialised machine to remove the hyacinth weeds from the dirty water has been dispatched, yet their efforts did not yield any result.

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As rescue officials face the mammoth task to locate the missing, they are now looking to drain large volumes of water from the 10-kilometre stretch of the river.

Watch |India: CCTV footage captures the moment Gujarat bridge collapsed

According to the Hindustan Times newspaper, Gujarat’s irrigation department has set up two large pumps on the bank of the river to remove water. In the last 48 hours, at least 700,000 litres of water have been drained.

“We have deployed two pumps of 50 horsepower each. They are pumping out around 12,000 litres of water every minute,” Hindustan Times quoted Prasanna Kumar, the National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF) commandant overseeing the search operations as saying.

The rescue mission takes inspiration from the 2018 Thailand cave rescue operation where hundreds of thousands of litres were removed from the cave and surrounding hills every hour to save the 12 trapped children and their soccer coach.

That operation had also spawned a film '13 Lives', and a mini-series, 'Thai Cave Rescue'.

(With inputs from agencies)

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