Six women workers killed as earth caves in at Ooty construction site

Ooty: Six construction workers were killed and six others were injured when the earth caved in along with an old building at a construction site on a slope at Gandhi Nagar in Lovedale limits near here on Wednesday. One worker is reportedly missing, too.

The tragedy occurred when the workers were digging the land for the construction of a retaining wall for a near-complete tourist cottage by a real-estate promoter, Frizo, a Keralaite settled here.

The workers, most of them hailing from the Gandhi Nagar and nearby areas, had returned to the work site after a tea break in the afternoon when the earth caved in along with an old public toilet at the top of the slope, covering them with a huge mass of soil and rubble. While some workers at the site were buried alive, a couple of them was trapped inside the fallen rubble.

The police and fire and rescue service personnel who rushed to the spot rescued six workers, including two women, and shifted them to the government medical college hospital here. The police later recovered the bodies of six women labourers, identified as Bhagyalakshmi, Muthulakshmi, Shakeela, Uma, Radha and Sangeetha , who were found dead inside the mess.

The police here have registered a case and arrested building proprietor Brizo, contractor Prakash, site supervisors Zaheer Ahmed and Anandaraj.