Hospital Wing Collapses in India; 14 Die

Part of a children’s hospital in northern India collapsed after heavy rains Monday, killing at least 14 people and injuring at least 50 others, authorities said. Rescuers searched into the night for survivors.

About 100 people were pulled from the debris shortly after the early morning disaster at the state-run facility in Jammu, 340 miles north of New Delhi. But the exact number of children, visiting parents and hospital aides trapped under the massive mound of rubble was not immediately known.

Rescuers were pumping oxygen and drinking water through the debris in hopes of sustaining any survivors, but “there are fewer and fewer signs of life,” one official said.

“I heard children moaning in the morning, but in late evening there was nothing, a kind of strange silence amid the noise of rescue work,” said Kashmir Times reporter Arun Joshi. “They may be dying.”

Authorities, blaming the collapse of the concrete structure on substandard building materials, immediately suspended three of the building’s engineers and filed a criminal case against the contractor. The main hospital was built 30 years ago, but the three-story new wing that collapsed was added in 1985.

“I was asleep when it fell,” said Ran Das, a weeping, grime-covered 60-year-old farmer who was visiting his 9-year-old son. “I woke up and found myself covered in rubble. . . . My only son, Durgagalla, was taken away dead. I also want to die now.”

Police and state officials said that by late Monday, workers had recovered 14 bodies--seven children, three women and four men.

The first signs of the collapse appeared Sunday after a fierce rainstorm caused large cracks on the third floor, forcing the evacuation of all 35 patients from that floor.

Officials said the hospital, however, did not evacuate the children from the first and second floors. All 75 beds on the first two floors were occupied when the empty top floor suddenly crumbled at 6 a.m. Monday.

The impact forced the second floor to cave in, officials said.

A majority of the patients at the facility were from poor rural areas, and weeping parents of dead children gathered outside the morgue at the nearby hospital where the injured had been admitted.

“Suddenly the building collapsed,” said Shajungala Devi, 30, who, with her son Sunil, 6, sustained slight injuries. “Not only the police, but also local people in the surrounding district came and dug me out from the debris.”