A construction worker and a contractor reportedly died of asphyxiation on Friday in a sump for water storage attached to a new building under construction at Udaiyampalayam, near Chinnavedampatti, in Coimbatore city on Friday.
Manoj (27) of Odisha, and G Kumar( 29) of Dharmapuri, a building contractor, were said to have died one after the other when the latter had stepped in to rescue the former who had swooned when he had entered to remove poles placed for the roof ceiling of the seven-ft deep sump.
The police had initially assumed they had been electrocuted, and later determined asphyxiation to be the cause of their deaths.
The Saravanampatti police retrieved the bodies for postmortem at the Coimbatore Medical College Hospital.
