Thane: On Monday evening, 37-year-old Premprakash Yadav left his workers’ quarters like any other day to head to the Sarlambe Village construction site of Mumbai-Nagpur Expressway. As has been the routine for years, briefing of the work to be done during the graveyard shift was given to the labourers. Yadav had worked at the site for almost a year.
The team of 28 people comprising workers and engineers reached Sarlambe to move a girder launching gantry to enable placing of the girder on Tuesday.
As the automatic launching machine started to move, a pleasant monsoon breeze made the arduous task more bearable. It takes a few minutes to move the specialised launcher, weighing 700 metric tonnes, by an inch. As the clock kept ticking, everything seemed normal and the team was skilled enough to do the engineering task. At 11.30pm, however, the 700 tonner came crashing down from a height of 35 metres.
Yadav was trapped
A portion of the launching crane trapped Yadav. The pain was unbearably intense and him went into shock. With whatever little consciousness he had, Yadav realised that some unknown people had gathered at the site. They were the villagers who were rudely woken up from their sleep and also the first responders to the incident.
“Me and 27 others were working on the girder launching machine for preparatory work. After the incident, I was unable to see my colleagues. Some of the villagers removed me from the mangled remains that had trapped me and put me in their vehicle so that I could get medical care at a nearby hospital in Shahapur,” Yadav says.
Later, from the rural hospital at Shahapur, he was moved to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Hospital in Kalwa.
No minor accident occurred last year
Yadav says that in the last one year, with the same set of team members, not even a minor incident had occurred. His narration to the strangers around him gets interrupted with a phone call from his family members residing hundreds of kilometres away in Uttar Pradesh.
His father has advice for him: Once you recuperate, please return home. Don’t work at a place where people play with your life. On hearing these words, in Bhojpuri, Yadav replies: “One of my legs is numb.”
