Three-year-old Nature Adventure Camp at Kanakapura, near Bengaluru, came under scrutiny on Monday after a Facebook post that went viral claimed that a woman was severely injured after suffering a fall while doing an activity there.
The post was written by Divyansh Gupta (30), who said that his wife is now in serious condition due to the camp’s negligent staff and sub-standard safety equipment.
The incident happened, Divyash wrote in the post, when they were doing ‘high rope activities’ on Sunday. They were doing an obstacle course of sorts, and the second activity was to cross a Burma loop bridge. This is essentially a ‘bridge’ where instead of planks there are dangling rope loops. You can hold on to the parallel ropes on the side, from which these loops are suspended. See this picture for reference.
“Somya (Divyansh’s wife) is not a professional when it comes to this or even an adventure buff. She was tired by the second activity. Halfway through it, she was slipping and could not continue. She wanted to be pulled up by the harness she was wearing,” Divyansh tells TNM.
“The helpers couldn’t pull her back and within 10 minutes, the harness rope broke mid air!!!! (sic),” he wrote in the Facebook post.
Somya (28) apparently fell from a height of 10 to 12 feet. Divyansh said that she could not move and was in acute pain, “She was able to tell me the points where it was paining. By her description, I had a hunch that she may have fractures.”
Divyansh knew that he could not move her without laying her on a flat surface like a stretcher. But there were no stretchers available and nothing else that could work as a substitute. “I asked if they had a wooden plank which I could lay her on, but there was no help,” he alleged. There also wasn’t a medical expert at hand.
He then called a local ambulance and took Somya to a hospital on Sarjapur Road where he was told she had “broken two vertebrae in her spinal cord” and the doctors recommended “bed rest for six weeks, surgery and complete healing over two years”.
Divyansh also flayed the camp in his post saying that it has been risking people’s lives with sub-standard safety equipment. He also called out Thrillophilia, a website which curates events and facilities such as this camp, and said that the portal shouldn’t promote places that do not meet proper safety criteria.
Read Divyansh’s full post here.
Camp management denies
TNM spoke to Somesh, one of the managers at the Nature Adventure Camp, who disputed Divyansh’s version of events and said that they have been using certified safety equipment.
“She got nervous while doing the second activity (Burma loops). Though it is our policy to not pull out a person once they have begun an activity, our instructor helped her come to one side and access a ladder, so she could climb down. She was climbing down from the ladder when she slipped and fell,” Somesh alleged.
He also claimed that the broken rope Divyansh has shown in the pictures, is actually a belaying rope, used for climbing. He denied that the harness broke, leading to Somya’s fall.
The photo of the rope posted by Divyansh
“Our harness is certified and of international standard. You can check, they are from Rock Empire Company,” he said.
He also contended that Somya did not fall from a height of 10 or 12 feet, as Divyansh mentions in his post. “The Burma loops are at a height of three to four feet,” Somesh said.
The aftermath of the accident
Somesh also said that despite the fact that there are hospitals located close to the camp, Divyansh insisted on taking Somya to a faraway hospital.
In retaliation, Divyansh defended himself saying that he did not trust a smaller or government-run hospital in the vicinity to deal with spinal fractures.
After Divyansh and Somya left in the ambulance, Divyansh said he received a call from the manager of the camp.
“He called me and asked if Somya was okay. I told him she wasn’t really okay – she was in a lot of pain and would need surgery. But he kept asking me the same question – possibly because the witnesses there wanted him to take responsibility,” Divyansh alleged.
He added, “I also asked him if he was going to take responsibility for what had happened and would cover Somya’s medical expenses. To that, he only told me that the owner was out of town and he would call once he returned on Monday.”
However, no such call came.
Divyansh lodged a police complaint at Kanakapura police station on Monday and an FIR was registered on Tuesday.
Divyansh said that Somya is out of surgery now and is recuperating, “We are taking it forward legally because this should not happen with anyone else. They shouldn’t suffer like this.”
While Divyansh is a sales professional at a renowned hotel chain, Somya works in marketing at an online grocery store service.