7 YEAR OLD TRAPPED IN LANDSLIDE

PANJIM: An urge to quench his thirst may have changed a seven-year-old boy's life forever, as he stayed trapped in a landslide for about 15 minutes on Tuesday.  Hanumantha was playing with his sister at a construction site near the St Inez cemetery when the landslide occurred. Rescued by labourers, the unconscious lad was rushed to a nearby hospital where he is battling for his life.

At noon Tuesday, Hanumantha's parents and other labourers were busy cutting the side of the Altinho hill, when the boy walked to a tap nearby to have a drink of water. Suddenly the side of the hill gave way and Hanumantha was buried about 2 m deep in the loose mud. "The labourers and Hanumantha's sister were not affected by the mud slide," an eyewitness said.

Raising an alarm, the panic-stricken parents and labourers frantically scoured the mud searching for the boy. They managed to rescue him, but he appeared lifeless.  "He must have been trapped inside the mud for over 10 minutes," said Aldrin Basilio Soares, a corporator of the Corporation of the City of Panjim (CCP).

The corporator who had reached the site on hearing the news rushed the victim to a nearby hospital. "My car had no space to reverse at the site and I rode the bike with a labourer holding the child on the pillion seat," he said.

The boy was rushed into the ICU of the private hospital, one km from the construction site. "When he was brought in, he had no heart beat," Dr Pinky Palienkar, a paediatrician at the hospital, said. Though the child had been gasping for breath on the way to the hospital, along the way, he turned lifeless.

At the hospital the victim was immedately put on a ventilator. "We started emergency resuscitation and within five minutes he recovered his breath and his heart beat a little," Palienkar said.

Doctors at the hospital are keen to learn about the history of his suffocation as it could provide clues about his condition. "We are told he was under the debris for about 20 minutes," Palienkar said.

Hanumantha is on a mechanical ventilator, and is still in a critical state. "We will have to monitor him for 72 hours to assess the final outcome of the trauma," said the doctor. "He is breathing on his own and his blood pressure is normal as of now," she added.

Doctors said that quick medical attention was crucial in the boy's recovery, and rushing him to hospital without waiting for an ambulance in this case was good. "If we had waited for the 108 ambulance, it may have been a different story," Soares said.

While the excavation into the toe of the hill was being carried out, the landslide was triggered at a spot about 5 m away from it. The boy was caught off guard when the unstable slope broke away and engulfed him.

An officer at Panjim police station said, "We have not yet booked a case against the builder since an inquiry is on.'' He did not provide any details. (TNN)