TIRUMALA: Rescue teams drawn from half a dozen government agencies could not save a man who fell into a gorge in the Tirumala hills and watched him die after clinging to a branch for more than six hours in the pitch dark night.The spot where P Rangaswamy fell is a treacherous gorge called Avvachari Kona, where eight pilgrim deaths have taken place in the last three years. The 29-year-old man from Vijayapuram in Kolar district of Karnataka youth fell into it Tuesday evening and died in the early hours of Wednesday, after making heart-rending calls from his mobile phone to an ambulance service, his family and even the media. Rescue teams reached the spot by midnight but had no means to extricate him.Rangaswamy was on his annual visit to the Tirumala shrine. As always, he started trekking up the hill from Alipiri. At around 7.30 pm, he slipped into the Avvachari Kona gorge and lost consciousness. His legs were broken and he was injured in the spine and neck.After coming to an hour later, Rangaswamy called the 108 medical emergency service on his mobile phone and explained his situation and described his location. The 108 staff passed on the SOS to the CTC Sanjeevini ambulance staff, who attend to emergency cases on the Tirumala ghat road.Local mediamen got to know of the incident and spoke to the desperate man. Rangaswamy spoke to his family on the cell phone and pleaded for help: “I can hear the sounds of buses and vehicles on the ghat road. But nobody is coming to rescue me,” he said. But, suffering bouts of incoherence, he could not explain how exactly he fell into the gorge.The police, forest, fire and TTD vigilance came together to form a rescue team and began a search for the exact spot where Rangaswamy clung to a tree. Finally, they found him at around 1:30 am, still alive. He was dead by the time they could reach him. This was the eighth death at the same spot in the last three years. The victim’s brother, Ranganth said it could not have been a suicide. A medico-legal case has been registered.The body was shifted first to the TTD’s Aswini hospital at Tirumala, where doctors declared Rangaswamy dead. The body was sent to Ruia Hospital in Tirupati.
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