At least three persons were killed and over a dozen injured following a cooking cylinder blast in a building in East Delhi’s Gandhi Nagar on Monday evening.
The incident primarily involved two multi-storey residential buildings facing each other in a narrow lane of Kailash Nagar. At least one of the dead is believed to have been a passerby.
Though the incident took place around 7 p.m., rescue operations continued until midnight.
Forced to cut off power supply to the locality, the rescuers had a task at hand digging out the victims.
The two affected buildings — four and five floors respectively — mainly house people from the low income groups. Locals claimed that there were at least 50 persons in the two buildings at the time of the blast.
“I did see smoke, but I thought someone was cooking on the first floor of the building. Suddenly, there was a cylinder blast,” said Rajesh, a resident of the building that has a tiny private office on the ground floor.
Rajesh climbed over dangerously to the next building and escaped even as some residents jumped off the first and second floors, hurting themselves in the process.
Meanwhile, within minutes, the blaze led to a blast in the compressor of an air-conditioner on the second floor of the building.
“The sound of the blast was such that I thought there was a bomb blast,” said Aditya, an eyewitness.
This caused the main damage as the debris from the building fell on a five-storey building right opposite it. Heavy building materials also landed on the road in between, killing at least one man and injuring three.
“I dug out two lifeless bodies from the building on which the debris from the opposite one had fallen. One was a man and another was a woman whose head was missing,” Aditya added.
While some locals claimed that they had dug out a fourth lifeless body, senior police officers confirmed three deaths in all and at least a dozen injured.
According to eyewitnesses, two of the dead include the family members of the owner of one of the buildings, but the identity of the dead could not be immediately confirmed by authorities.
Locals, meanwhile, claimed that the dozen injured do not include those people who were hit by bricks flying from the debris. “I myself sustained injuries in my leg and chest,” said Abhishek Gupta, a local businessman.
Narrow roads leading to the accident spot delayed rescue operations by the authorities, according to the local residents.
Until then, the locals stepped in to dig out the victims and rush them to hospital.
Locals claimed there were at least 50 persons in the two buildings at the time of the blast
