New Delhi:With the rescue operation to find the missing people in Gujarat's tragic Morbi bridge collapse still underway, VVN Prasanna Kumar -- Commandant of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) -- on Tuesday said the chances of survival of the missing people are quite low. "Those who are still missing have feeble to no chances of survival. We are continuing relief efforts with the intention to at least find the dead bodies and hand them over to the family members. 125 personnel of NDRF are engaged in relief work," he said.
Kumar is the head of the NDRF unit in Gujarat and is currently leading the relief operations in Morbi with 5 teams. He spoke exclusively to ETV Bharat, giving a detailed insight into the matter.
Commenting on the possible reason behind the bridge collapse, the Commandant said that the most likely reason is the overloading of the bridge four times beyond its capacity. He further said that holding the bridge cables and swinging them dangerously by some people on the bridge, as can be seen in the CCTV footage that surfaced on Monday, has worked at an extreme disadvantage.
"So far, 135 people have been confirmed dead in the Morbi tragedy. Some people are still missing. The bridge has the capacity to carry around 125 people. But there were more than 400 people on it when it collapsed. To make things even worse, some youths were swinging the iron cables on which the bridge was based," he said.
Also read:Morbi tragedy: Stories of loss, grief and rage from bereaved families
Mentioning the role of a private company, Kumar further said, "A private company took over the management of the bridge. Some have claimed that they charged entry fees from the visitors. There is still no clarity on this matter. It seems that the company representatives failed to control tourists. The government, on the other hand, claimed that they were unaware that so many visitors were trying to cross the bridge at once," he said.
"By the time our teams reached the spot from Vadodara and Gandhinagar on Sunday, the situation was out of hand. We unfortunately could not save anyone's life. We will continue the relief work in Morbi for another 2-3 days and see how many bodies we are able to recover," he added.
