Villagers use door as stretcher to carry pregnant woman to hospital amid flood

Palghar,UPDATED: Jul 8, 2026 13:10 IST

With floodwaters cutting off their village and no ambulance able to reach them, residents of Maharashtra's Palghar district turned a wooden house door into a makeshift stretcher, carrying a pregnant woman through chest-deep water to a hospital just in time for her delivery.

Balancing the makeshift stretcher on their shoulders, villagers waded through chest-deep water to carry Priyanka Ravi Yadav to Palghar’s Saphale Rural Hospital, where she later delivered a healthy baby boy.

Hospital officials said on Wednesday that both mother and child were doing well.

A video of the rescue, showing villagers carefully navigating the flooded stretch with Yadav lying on the wooden door, has since gone viral on social media.

Yadav, a resident of Palghar’s Hanumanpada village, went into labour on Tuesday after heavy rain submerged roads and left the village isolated. With no ambulance able to reach the area, her family feared they would not be able to get her to a hospital in time.

Local ASHA worker Divya Gharat and social worker Chetan Gawad quickly rallied residents, who improvised with the only thing available, a wooden door from a nearby house. They placed Yadav on it and carried her across the flooded landscape to the nearest hospital.

"The situation was terrifying, and the water was rising rapidly. We knew we couldn't just sit and watch. The roads had disappeared, so we used whatever we could find, a house door, and moved as fast as possible through the water," Gharat recalled.

Medical officer Dr Shubhangi Sanap said both the mother and newborn were healthy, capping a rescue in which quick thinking and community effort overcame the odds posed by the floods.

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With inputs from Mohammad Hussain Khan