To avoid such a scenario in the future, the civic authorities have decided to centralise information on the injured and dead.
Manish Divekar’s father still remembers that seemingly endless night of July 11 when his son’s friends searched frantically for 25-year-old Manish.
They went from hospital to hospital looking through the list of injured and dead in the hope of finding Manish.
After visiting the morgues of at least a dozen hospitals across the city, they finally found his body at the V N Desai Hospital at Santacruz.
“We went to Cooper, then to Nanavati Hospital and then to Asha Parekh. But when we went there, we were directed to V N Desai Hospital. Nobody knew where to find him,” recalls Pranay Saundalkar, Manish’s friend.
Tragic experience
For relatives of disaster victims, experiences like these only accentuate the tragedy.
The municipal corporation has now decided that lists of people injured or dead in disasters will be centrally collated and for easier access, this data will be put up on the Internet, subject to requisite permissions from the police.
“If someone’s relative or friend is looking for their loved one, who they feel might have been in an accident in Mumbai, they can find that person through our network. They can look through all the municipal hospitals and the morgues through this network,” informed Mangal Bhanushali, Chairman, Health Committee, BMC.
Though the draft for this plan was ready almost a year-and-a-half ago, the BMC is implementing it only now. Relatives of the injured or deceased will now get information at Sion Hospital.