20210415 Patna: Major fire at Lok Nayak Bhawan guts IOCL regional office
India Apr 15 2021 “Building” “Office bldg.”
Dead : dead 0 or unknown Burnout : 1 to 29 Injured : injured 0 or unknown
Patna: Major fire at Lok Nayak Bhawan guts IOCL regional office
Updated: 2021-04-15
PATNA: A major fire broke out at the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Bhawan at the Dakbungalow roundabout around midnight here on Tuesday. It took more than 10 hours of intense firefighting to douse the flames, which gutted the regional office of the Indian Oil Corporation Limited(IOCL).
Indrajeet Kumar, a fire brigade official present at the spot, told TOI on Wednesday that the fire started at the computer server room in the IOCL office located on the fifth floor of the building. A short-circuit is suspected to be the reason behind the fire. “The fire was reported at 11.53 pm on Tuesday, after which fire tenders rushed to the spot. We were successful in containing the fire till the fifth floor. It didn’t spread to other parts of the building,” he said, adding, the server room and other sections with documents were reduced to ashes. Kumar said altogether 16 fire tenders, five mini tenders and a hydraulic ladder system were used in firefighting. lbinsert”,”pos”:4,”state”:”LIVE from Bihar Elections Flames were seen leaping out of the fifth-floor windows even on Wednesday morning and smoke billowed till noon, an eyewitness said.
Fire officials at the spot said the sixth and seventh floors have become extremely hot and filled with soot, while the walls of the seventh floor have cracked.
IOCL sources said an internal committee would probe the cause of the fire and assess the losses incurred.
“Work for Bihar and Jharkhand has been crippled. The entire office is destroyed,” a senior IOCL employee said, adding, real-time monitoring of fuel stocks in Bihar and Jharkhand would resume with the help of another server at a different location.
“Altogether 90 permanent and 24 contractual employees were working at the state office,” the source added.
The Bhawan, where the erstwhile Dakbungalow was located before Independence, is managed by the district board. While the entire fifth floor is occupied by IOCL, the sixth floor has the offices of HPCL, IFFCO and the regional office of the Central Groundwater Board.
The seventh floor has an office of the superintending engineer of the Archaeological Survey of India (excavation branch-III) and a chemical laboratory of CGWB with imported scientific equipment worth several crores for monitoring of groundwater samples from Bihar and Jharkhand.
The overall damage from the fire is estimated to be worth several crores, fire officials said. CGWB scientists Dr Suresh Kumar and AK Sinha said they fear that costly equipment such as the sensitive atomic absorption spectrophotometer and ion chromatography has been damaged from extreme heat and soot.
“The spectrophotometer is worth Rs 50 lakh imported from England and the chromatograph is worth Rs 40 lakh imported from Germany,” they told this newspaper at the spot.
IFFCO manager (accounts) Rajan Kumar Kesri said all computers and other electronic items in his office are destroyed from the extreme heat and soot.
“It seems we won’t be able to come to the office for at least three to four days due to the overheated building,” Kesri said.
Web Source: The Times of India