The efficiency and reliability of convergecast in sensor network depends on the correct and efficient accumulation of data to the sink. A tree, rooted at the sink, that utilizes sensor resources properly is an ideal topology for data gathering. Resource constrained sensor nodes are highly prone to sudden crash. So the application demands a quick and efficient repairing of the tree when a node dies. The proposed scheme builds a data gathering tree rooted at the sink. The tree eventually becomes a Breadth First Search (BFS) tree where each node maintains the shortest hop-count to the root to reduce the routing delay. Each node collects some extra neighborhood information during the tree construction. Thus a little pre-processing at each node helps in taking prompt actions to repair the tree through local adjustment if any arbitrary single or multiple nodes fail in future. On failure of a node, each affected node in its vicinity fixes the parent through a pair of control message transmissions. Simulation results show that the repairing delay is significantly less in average and the convergecast messages are delivered with minimum data loss and no redundancy even in presence of node crash. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.