Guards on India bridge struggled

A security guard stood
at either end of a 145-year-old footbridge in the Indian town of
Morbi on Sunday evening, blowing whistles and repeatedly asking
surging crowds to get off the structure spanning the murky
Machchhu river, witnesses said.
One of the six people who saw the bridge collapse and gave
an account of its final moments to Reuters said he and his
colleagues also shouted from the shore to warn of the danger.
At least 135 people were killed when the structure, built in
1877, gave way, sending victims plunging into the waters below.
Police estimate the number of people on the bridge at around
200. Local officials said about 400 tickets had been sold,
although not necessarily to be on the bridge at the same time.
“We even called out to people to tell them that they should
leave because we could see there was a lot of crowding,” Ajay
Kumar told Reuters, saying he and his colleagues were on the
eastern river bank watching the crowd build.
“Then the bridge collapsed in front of our eyes,” the
32-year-old construction worker said.
He said women and children were among those who drowned,
adding that he heard them wailing and screaming.
In the hours before the accident, several hundred people
gathered on and around the 233 metre (255 yard) bridge that
reopened last week after months of renovation work.
A single private security guard was present at each end of
the bridge but they struggled to control the surge of sightseers
as evening fell, four other witnesses and a survivor said. The
witnesses did not know whether the security guards had survived.
“‘Please listen to us, don’t shake the bridge, don’t crowd,
keep moving’ the guards were saying, but people were not
listening,” said Pankaj Kumar, another construction worker who
was on the riverside.
Kumar’s account was echoed by three other witnesses and by
Mahesh Bhai Chavda, a survivor who said he entered the bridge
with his friends minutes before the collapse, via one of the
ticket booths at either end of the bridge.
“We saw security guys blowing their whistles at people
asking them to not crowd and keep moving,” said Chavda, 18.
DESPERATE FAMILIES
CCTV footage showed a group of young men taking photos while
others tried to rock the bridge from side to side in the moments
before the cables snapped and they plunged from the narrow
walkway.
Police have so far arrested nine people on charges of
culpable homicide not amounting to murder.
Those arrested included ticketing clerks and three security
guards who were on duty when the bridge collapsed, senior police
official Ashok Kumar Yadav said. Reuters could not confirm
whether the two guards who witnesses reported seeing at the
bridge were among the three arrested.
“The incident happened due to lack of crowd regulation and
management,” Yadav, who is leading a government investigation
into the incident, told Reuters.
Late on Tuesday, a child’s blue shoe lay near the entrance
to the bridge that bears the signage of Oreva, best known as a
maker of clocks and electrical products, and which was awarded a
contract this year to maintain and manage the bridge.
Municipal official Sandeepsinh Zala said Oreva had not
informed local authorities about reopening the bridge.
An Oreva spokesperson has not replied to repeated calls and
text messages from Reuters since Sunday to seek comment on the
incident and the witness accounts.
The Indian Express newspaper quoted an Oreva spokesperson on
Sunday as saying: ” … the bridge collapsed as too many people
in the mid-section of the bridge were trying to sway it from one
way to the other.”
The chaotic scenes continued at Morbi’s main government
hospital.
Hundreds of people gathered there, desperate to find out
about their loved ones, and bodies lay on stretchers and on beds
inside wards, volunteer helper Bhaskar Wala said.
A staff member, who asked not to be named, said there was
little space to move around because of the crowding and it was
hard to identify the living from the dead.
“People were sharing photographs of their family members
with us,” said Wala, 33. “I helped identify eight members of the
one family all of whom died.”