20210312 Kolkata: Day after fire, elevators to death raise unavoidable questions
India Mar 12 2021 “Building” “Other bldg.”
Dead : dead 5 to 9 Burnout : 1 to 29 Injured : injured 1 to 9
Kolkata: Day after fire, elevators to death raise unavoidable questions
Updated: 2021-03-12
The gutted 13th floor of New Koliaghat building on Strand Road
KOLKATA: For eight men, elevator rides to the burning top floor of the New Koilaghat Building on Monday evening turned out to be suicide missions. The elevators metamorphosed into death chambers as soon as the doors opened on the 13th floor with flames leaping in and singing them instantly.
The day after the horrific tragedy, senior fire brigade officials were at pains to explain why experienced firemen had overlooked the basics of firefighting and taken an elevator ride to meet their end. The decision was so bizarre that even CM Mamata Banerjee expressed surprise when she visited the site on Monday night. “How did experienced firemen use the elevator when everyone knows they are to be avoided during a fire or an earthquake,” she had remarked.
Fire department officials admitted the deaths were entirely avoidable. “I don’t know who was at the command control but the team committed a cardinal mistake when they used the elevator to access the fire on the 13th floor. In the past, we have tackled fires in taller buildings like Nandaram Market by accessing it through the stairs,” said a former fire department deputy director. “Too many things went wrong in the fire-fighting operation and there should be a thorough probe. What should have been a routine fire-fighting exercise turned into a disaster. It is extremely unfortunate that so many lives were needlessly lost,” he said.
Fire consultant Tarak Chakraborty said the actions of the firemen were amateurish. “The fire service is a professional force who act with caution to preserve lives. However inexplicable their action may be, we need to find out why to prevent a repeat,” he said.
The burnt bodies of firefighters Girish Dey, Gourab Bej, Aniruddha Jana and Biman Purkait, policeman Amit Bhowal and railway staffer Sudip Das were found in the lift lobby. Two others who had inadvertently travelled up another elevator — railway deputy chief commercial manager Parthasarathi Mondal and RPF constable Sanjay Sahani — died trapped inside the lift. The duo were evacuating from the 2nd floor, but the elevator climbed up to the 13th instead. The ninth victim, railway senior commercial clerk Shravan Pandey, worked on the 13th floor and wasn’t able to evacuate. Two others, a fireman and a railway employee, are in hospital with injuries.
According to a senior fire brigade official, the command was to use the lift till the 10th floor to set up a system quickly. “The advance team was to set up the system — place hose pipe at strategic points closer to the affected floor and drop the other ends to the ground to link to the pump. The rest of the fire-fighters were to take the staircase. But the team instead landed on the 13th floor after the railway staff who was guiding them pressed the wrong button,” claimed Debtanu Basu, a senior divisional fire officer.
But another senior fire services official hinted at a possible mechanical fault in the elevator. “The officers were too experienced to follow the lead of someone else. It looks like they had tried to go till 10th floor but the elevator moved all the way up to the top floor where they faced the ball of fire. If there was no mechanical fault why would the elevator with the railway deputy CCM move up instead of down?” said the official.
But several other questions still remain unanswered: Why didn’t anyone press the emergency stop button in the elevator once it moved past the 10th floor? Why did the firemen agree to use an elevator with automatic doors as a fire lift? Why wasn’t power switched off in the building once the fire was detected?
The Railways, police and fire department have instituted separate inquiries to probe the whys and hows.
An Eastern Railway spokesperson admitted electricity had not been disconnected after the fire and the elevators were being used to evacuate people. “Since mock drills were never carried out, we had no idea that elevators should not be used during a fire,” said a rail employee working in the New Koilaghat building.
The railway deputy CCM and his guard had also taken the the lift from the second floor instead of the staircase to reach the ground floor. Whether the elevator had started moving up because a railway employee stranded on the 13th floor had pressed the lift button in his dying moments or whether it had malfunctioned due to the heat is yet to be ascertained.
Web Source: The Times of India