Ranchi, May 7: A PowerGrid Corporation of India team that went to probe the collapse of an electric tower at Silli, Ranchi, on May 4, which crushed three workers instantaneously, has ruled out any human error or chance of sabotage in the incident.
Following the accident, most of the workers engaged by Larsen and Toubro, the working contractor, for putting up transmission towers from Maithon to Ranchi and in Rourkela, have left the area.
Before they took off, they carried the bodies of their fellow workers to Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences for a postmortem.
The deceased have been identified as Gajendra Das, Sen Verma and Vidur Kumar, who hail from a village called Khagaria, Bihar.
PowerGrid Corporation representative S.R. Choudhary told The Telegraph that the crash was a result of a storm that hit the site on the afternoon of May 4.
It was the impact of high-speed winds that had knocked down the steel grids, leading to the collapse of the tower.
As the tower fell, it crushed the three labourers, working atop the structure, to death. A fourth labourer, identified as Vidur Singh, was thrown far away as a result of the impact but escaped with grievous injuries, said the member of the probe team that landed at Ranchi yesterday and also visited the accident site.
Vidur is currently admitted in the ICU of a city hospital.
Larsen and Toubro, which is handling the project that meant putting up around 550 towers along a 200-km stretch from Maithon to Ranchi, would be liable to pay compensation to the next of the kin of the deceased as well as to the injured worker.
The L&T project was undertaken to fetch power from the Damodar Valley Corporation unit at Kahalgaon directly to Ranchi, which meant laying transmission lines from Maithon to Rourkella via Ranchi.
According to the scheme, power would then be supplied to Rourkella in Orissa and Chhattisgarh through respective state grids.
The state government, however, is yet to provide land necessary for the construction of a 400 KVA substation at Ranchi for the project.
