Rescue
After the collapse, many passers-by began to try pulling out survivors. They were soon joined by the Singapore Fire Service, the Police Task Force of the Singapore Police Force and the Singapore Armed Forces. A nearby business, Eagle Piano Company, became a center for the rescue operation.
As there were survivors buried in the rubble, the rescue was a delicate operation. Debris was carefully removed as power saws and drills cut through the rubble.
Sound detectors were used to locate survivors beneath the slabs by picking up faint moans and cries. In the first 12 hours, 9 people were rescued. At one time, LTC Lim Meng Kin, Chief Medical Officer, and several other SAF doctors and two Ministry of Health doctors took turns and crawled through narrow spaces inside the rubble in an effort to provide assistance to trapped survivors, giving glucose and saline drips to them.
Tunneling experts from Britain, Ireland, and Japan, led by Tony Gallagher who were involved in the construction of the Mass Rapid Transit joined in the effort and helped rescue an additional eight survivors.
After the seven-day rescue operation, 17 people were rescued, but 33 people lost their lives. The last survivor, Chua Kim Choo, 30, was rescued on 18 March 1986, having survived after hiding beneath a table.
Read more about this topic: Hotel New World Disaster
Famous quotes containing the word rescue:
“In the event of an oxygen shortage on airplanes, mothers of young children are always reminded to put on their own oxygen mask first, to better assist the children with theirs. The same tactic is necessary on terra firma. There’s no way of sustaining our children if we don’t first rescue ourselves. I don’t call that selfish behavior. I call it love.”
—Joyce Maynard (20th century)
“Here I pause in my sojourning, giving thanks for having come,
come to trust, at every turning, God will guide me safely home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God,
Came to rescue me from danger, precious presence, precious blood.”
—Robert Robinson (1735–1790)
“We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd.... Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste...? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)