With the blaze and swirling clouds of smoke from the cellar of four-storey Ruby Luxury hotel going up and up, policemen and civilians were racking up their brains on how to rescue the inmates trapped inside the building.
Tukaramgate Detective Inspector A. Anjaneyulu, who was on night duty on Monday, rushed there on being alerted by senior officials. There was no way anyone could go up the building from the front side. So, he ran inside the adjacent Yatri Inn hotel building and went up the terrace.
From that building, he jumped onto the terrace of Ruby Hotel. Three civilians atop the Yatri Inn building too joined him. “It was dark all around and we could hear screams for help from the staircase side,” he recalled.
Since he had no face mask, the Inspector took off his banian and tied it around his face. As he went down the staircase, accompanied by some civilians, they found two persons lying in a semi-conscious state on the passage leading to the fourth floor.
Without wasting a second, Anjaneyulu and other Good Samaritans began shifting them to the terrace. “It was difficult because those persons were heavy. We ensured one of the civilians used torchlight to lead us,” the Inspector said.
After reaching terrace, with the help of a ladder provided by the firemen, the two persons were shifted onto Yatri Inn building terrace. “We made them lie on that terrace for some time so that they can recuperate while alerting officers to keep ambulances ready for shifting rescued persons to hospital,” said Mr. Anjaneyulu.
He and other civilians went for the second round of searching struggling not to get asphyxiated by the increased smoke coming upwards. “Someone shouted at us to use wet cloth as mask. So I took out the banyan, dipped in water and continued to use it as mask,” he narrated.
They managed to rescue three more persons in similar fashion from the fourth floor. Following instructions from the officers, they started forcibly opening doors of all rooms to check if anyone was trapped inside on third and fourth floors.
The Inspector had a shock of his life when he saw one inmate lying on passage way on second floor. “I wasn’t sure about his identity. But that man apparently tried to break the window glass with his hand to escape only to suffer bleeding cut wounds,” Anjaneyulu said stating that there was a pool of blood on the floor at that place.
By the time, the Inspector and batch of civilians managed to reach the second floor, the firemen too entered that part of the building with another group of policemen and civilians. The physical strain, nausea caused by inhalation of smoke, pain of small scraping injuries disappeared on realising that some lives if not of all were saved, he said.
