More than 300 Army personnel are involved in the search and rescue operation at the accident site in Morbi, Gujarat, where a cable suspension bridge collapsed on Sunday. Teams of the Indian Navy and Coast Guard are also deployed there. Giving details of the army effort, sources said here on Monday that multiple Army Columns (total nine columns) including Engineer Task Force and Medical detachments mobilised from Dhrangdhara, Jamnagar and Bhuj. They started moving at 2040 hours on Sunday and the first column reached the incident site at 2130 hours. One column has about 100 soldiers. The teams are equipped with Engineer Stores and are assisting NDRF, SDRF, Indian Navy, Coast Guard in rescue efforts in addition to helping civil administration and police in crowd management and security, sources said.
Immediately after arrival, Army columns first started crowd control and dispersal including route clearance from the accident site to the civil hospital. The columns immediately got into the National Disaster Response Force(NDRF), State Disaster Response Force(SDRF) and state fire services boats and assisted in search operations.
Four medical columns assisted in treatment of survivors in three hospitals including the civil hospital, Krishna hospital and Ayush hospital, they said. The Indian Army is fully committed in assisting the civil administration and all other agencies for humanitarian operations to prevent loss of lives, treatment of survivors and further retrieval of the remaining bodies as part of search operations, they said.