'I thought it was a quake'

NEW DELHI: For people in the neighbourhood, it sounded like a bomb blast. For those who actually witnessed the accident at the Metro construction site on Sunday morning, it was a sight they were unlikely to forget in a hurry.
Labourer Lal Bihari (28), a resident of Sistola in Bihar's Katihar district, was one of the people working at the site when the incident occured.It was one of the last few days at work for him, before he proceeded home for Chhat puja. "I had just climbed onto the the concrete segment along with three of my friends and was trying to fix it in the right position. For a fleeting moment I thought that the launcher had not been fixed properly. However, as nothing happened, I did not bother to check again. Around 7 am, one side of the launcher just gave away and I saw my friends being thrown onto the ground below. The next moment, I found myself in mid-air. I thought I would die. I do not remember anything after that,'' he said, lying on the his bed at the LBS Hospital.
His friend Shankar Majhi (45) from Bhagalpur lay a few beds away, writhing in pain. With severe head injuries and on a drip, he was barely able to whisper a few words to the Metro officials who visited him. "It felt like I was not going to meet my family anymore,'' was all he could say to Times City.
Tourist taxi driver Ranjit Singh, who had come to pick up a customer from a hotel in Shakarpur, it was an episode the he would remember all his life."I had just parked my Tavera and got out to call my customer with whom I was supposed to go for a round trip to Agra. I heard a loud noise and turned back only to see my Travera cab crushed under an electric pole and a huge cement slab.'' he said, still trembling. "It took me a lot of courage to inform the owner about the accident,'' he added.
And even two hours after the accident, Singh could not come to terms with the fact that he had just beaten certain death by a whisker. Said he: "I wanted to call my client over the phone. Had I done that and continued to sit in that parked car, I would have been dead.'' Had everything gone according to plan, he would have also seen the Taj Mahal on Sunday. Now he is thankful he has survived to see the marvel on some other day.
For 42-year-old eyewitness Akash Mishra, the collapse appeared like a scene straight out of a film. Mishra was walking towards Vikas Marg and had got out of a bylane in Shakarpur when the accident happened."Remember that picture of people running with fear in their eyes when the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed? This disaster may seem really small in comparison to that, but I along with other people ran like mad from the spot as the structures came crashing down,'' he recounted.
CA student Abhilash Sharma ran out of his hostel in Shakarpur thinking that an earthquake had struck. The entire hostel building shook with the impact of the crash at the Metro site. As he and his fellow inmates ran towards Vikas Marg, they realised what had actually happened.