<i>A rescue at all too difficult place</i>

Hope was fading away fast for Alamgir as the rescuers were yet to find his wife and three children till yesterday afternoon.
By evening, Alamgir, a staff of a private mobile phone company, started to believe that his young family was no more alive.
At 10:45pm, his hope was even less as the rescuers pulled away the bodies of his two sons from the rubbles, and started knocking down the concrete structure of the toppled building, where at least six people including Alamgir's wife and daughter were still believed to be trapped.
Twenty-one hours since the collapse of the building, the rescuers could only begin the main rescue operation at 9:00pm yesterday, at South Begunbari of Tejgaon in the capital.
They said there was a very little possibility of finding anyone alive under the debris while around five to six people of at least three families were still missing.
It took around an hour for the fire fighters to make an operation plan after reaching the spot Tuesday midnight, as the building had been erected on some concrete pillars in a swamp of seven to eight feet depth, densely surrounded by tin-shed slum houses.
They just had to concentrate on removing the debris of corrugated iron sheets of tin-shed slum houses on which the building fell.
By 2:00am an army rescue team from 14 Engineers Brigade joined the operation and around 3:00am, they managed to make some holes into the debris, and brought out three dead and 14 survivors.
Later in the early morning, the rescuers tried to make use of the under construction road of Hatirjheel project to reach the spot using heavy equipment like an excavator, bulldozers, dumpers, cranes, and water pumps, but could hardly use those due to a lack of space.
An ET (emergency tender) vehicle, fitted with around 200 types of essential equipment including hydraulic cutters, hydraulic spades, hypertension axes, hammers, lock cutters, and slab cutters reached the spot, but the equipment remained mostly unused.
"We're facing stiff difficulties to run the rescue operation as the required space for the operation is not there, and the building was erected on a jheel," Director Operation of Fire Brigade Major Shahjalal told The Daily Star.
Around 150 fire fighters and 100 rescuers from the army were working relentlessly at the site.
As the daylight broke, the rescuers removed a three-storey tin-shed slum house and started making a road by dumping sand into the swamp from the northern bank of the under construction Hatirjheel project.
Before the earth filling, the rescuers launched a search to ascertain that there was no body in the water.
However, the making of the road had to wait for two hours from 4:00pm as the excavator went out of order.
Besides, scorching heat during the day, and drizzle at noon and night, also hampered the rescue operation.
Around 6:00pm two divers got down into pitched-black water, contaminated with waste, in search of bodies.
Director General of Fire Brigade and Civil Defence Brig Gen Abu Nayeem Mohammad Shahidullah in the afternoon said they would try to remove all the debris to find if any person was still under it.
The rescue operation was suspended at 12:00am today to resume later in the morning.