A team led by M. Manikandan, a faculty member of the TVS Community College, Madurai, who had improvised a borewell rescue robot imparted training to the fire and rescue services (FRS) personnel in Vellore district on Saturday. They were attached to the fire stations in and around Vellore.
Mr. Manikandan had been involved in rescuing children trapped in borewells in different places in Karnataka in the last one year. The equipment, costing Rs.60,000 comprises five types of iron hand sets, 100-foot rope, 100-foot galvanised iron pipes, an infra-red camera to photograph the trapped child, a laptop model TV to view the child from above the ground and a pressure gauge to regulate the pressure at which the child is gripped by the handset during the rescue operation.
3 FRS divisions
The expert from Madurai said that he had supplied three borewell rescue robots to three FRS divisions, namely, Vellore, Madurai and Tiruchi on orders placed by the Director of Fire and Rescue Services, Tamil Nadu in last September. He said that he was requested by the Karnataka government to rescue the children trapped in abandoned tubewells at Hangaraji village in Badami taluk in Bagalkot district in August 2014 and in Bijapur on June 23, 2014.
But on both occasions, he could not rescue the children alive owing to the delay in getting information and delay in reaching the spot. “The rescue team has to reach the spot within four hours and start the operation if the child should be rescued alive,” he said.
The latest incident in which two-and-a-half-year-old boy Thamizharasan who fell into an abandoned borewell pit in Koorambadi village in Arcot taluk on April 12 could not be saved despite an 8-hour-long operation brought to fore the need for stationing such equipment at least one in each district under the control of the fire station in the district headquarters so that the equipment could be reached on time to save such children.
Meenakshi Vijayakumar, Deputy Director of Fire and Rescue Services, North Western Region, Vellore told The Hindu that the FRS team started work fairly early with the robot during the Arcot rescue operation but the child could not be rescued quickly because of the fact that earth caved in covering the child because of the earlier amateurish efforts of the local people in trying to save the child.
Delay
Though we had the equipment, trained personnel had to come from the FRS Division in Tambaram. “Now, we have commenced a training programme in Vellore, under which six persons were trained today by the Madurai team. The trained personnel will in turn impart training to FRS personnel from other FRS units in Vellore, Tiruvannamalai, Kancheepuram and Tiruvallur districts in the days to come so that trained personnel are readily available to undertake the rescue operation whenever needed”, she said.
C. Murugesan, Divisional Fire and Rescue Services Officer, Vellore said that steps should be taken to close all the abandoned borewell pits so that such incidents do not occur. However, the training programme would ensure that trapped children could be rescued alive through professionally trained teams, he said.
