One of the officers quoted above said around 650 trained personnel were involved in the firefighting operation. No firefighter suffered any injury or damage, he added.
On the afternoon of June 12, an officer working with the Ahmedabad Fire and Emergency Services (AFES) received an emergency call. With the number of fire cases rising in the scorching summer, responding to such emergencies is par for the course for the city’s fire officers. But what this officer heard next was something nothing could have prepared any of them for: A plane crash.
“All odds were against us: From the traffic to the public, to the wind direction and the intensity of the fire. Nothing had prepared us for this. But there was a job to be done, so we got down to it,” said another AFES officer, one of the several team leaders who answered the call in response to the crash of Air India flight AI 171 that resulted in the deaths of 241 out of 242 passengers and at least 19 ground casualties.
