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Fire next time

Thursday's fire in an office complex in Kolkata's Pretoria Street has once again exposed the vulnerability of high-rise constructions many of which…

Fire next time

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Thursday's fire in an office complex in Kolkata's Pretoria Street has once again exposed the vulnerability of high-rise constructions many of which have come up with scant regard for safety regulations. From AMRI to Aspirations Vintage, the culpability must rest equally on the real estate developers, the KMC, and also of course the fire services department. That collective failure was manifest at 12 Pretoria Street, in the building adjacent to Abhinav Bharati School.

Mercifully there were no casualties; the tragedy could have been horrendous. The worst was averted after the Fire Brigade shattered the glass facade on the third and fourth floors. But the potentially mortal faultlines that the
mishap has thrown up call for serious reflection and more importantly, the will to act. It might sound incredible but nonetheless is true that equipment such as smoke detectors and sprinkers did not function; they exist as embroideries in the construction plan that was approved by the civic authorities.

It now transpires that the mandatory regulation to conduct a drill at regular intervals to check these gadgets was violated with a degree of negligent nonchalance. Not that it is one of the Old Buildings of Calcutta (OBC) in the category of the
Park Street landmark, Stephen Court, that went up in flames in 2012 with the attendant deaths, totally horrifying. The Pretoria Street edifice came up barely six years ago.

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More the reason, therefore, that it ought to have been equipped with the latest fire-fighting gadgets. Far from it. And the lack of safeguards in a building that houses several offices, including the public sector GAIL, is said to have bamboozledthe Fire Brigade authorities. Confusion was made worse confounded in a glass-and-steel structure,
whose smoke detectors in every floor had failed when disaster struck on Thursday afternoon, during peak office hour and with classes in full swing in the school next door.

No less shocking was the absence of foam extinguishers and adequate water in the reservoir. The few extinguishers that were available turned out to be useless in the fight against what has been called an “electrical fire”.

Aside from the inbuilt dangers of this six-storied building, the fire services department isn't absolutely sure whether it had a fire-safety clearance. “It appears that the building has some equipment, although we need to find out whether or not
they were properly maintained and whether there were trained personnel to handle such equipment,” is the disconcerting response of the Director of the Fire and Emergency Services Department.

At the end of the day, the critical issue that ought now to be addressed is whether the building had the wherewithal to be granted clearance by the KMC. Or is the construction yet another real estate fiddle?

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