What happened

An air-preheater maintenance platform collapsed in Unit 5 of NTPC's 2,980 MW Sipat Super Thermal Power Station while contract workers were carrying out annual maintenance. Contemporaneous police and plant accounts said five workers were involved, one died and four were injured. A police case filed after the investigation records that a second worker later died. One early report instead described a 60-tonne ash tank falling, about 60 workers trapped and seven extracted; stronger contemporaneous police and plant reporting identifies the failed structure as the air-preheater platform and does not support that mass-casualty account, so those claims are preserved here only as a corrected early-report discrepancy. This is separate from the 2017 NTPC Unchahar boiler explosion.

When cited sources give different casualty, damage or spill figures for this event, they’re reported side by side above rather than merged into one number. See how confidence levels work.