20200119 Kolkata: Early-morning fire guts wellness centre in Kankurgachhi building
India Nov 04 2020 “Building” “Complex bldg.”
Dead : dead 0 or unknown Burnout : 1 to 29 Injured : injured 0 or unknown
Kolkata: Early-morning fire guts wellness centre in Kankurgachhi building
Updated: 2020–01–20
KOLKATA: A fire at a building in a building at the Kankurgachhi intersection on Sunday morning left residents — mostly senior citizens — panicked and a paralysed woman panting for breath till she was rescued by neighbours. The fire that broke out inside a beauty and wellness centre revived memories of a more devastating one at the same spot 13 months ago.
Vinod Bansal, president of the seven-storey Kashi Niket, was in his fourth-floor apartment when he noticed the fire. “Around 8.15am, there was a stench of burning. We had had a horrific time just 13 months ago when a fire inside a commercial area on the first floor leapt till the fifth floor and burnt a portion of our house. That fear forced me to run downstairs to investigate. I found thick smoke billowing from the beauty and wellness centre on the first floor,” Bansal recounted.
Almost the entire first floor has been gutted
Security guards had, by that time, alerted the fire brigade and fire tenders soon reached the spot. “The challenge was to evacuate the elderly persons. It being a Sunday morning, many of them were still asleep and we didn’t know who was aware and who wasn’t. Even my kids were asleep,” Bansal added.
The stretcher used to bring down an ailing woman from the second floor of the building and the ambulance sent by the local police station
The biggest concern for the residents was a paralysed woman with her residence just above the seat of fire. “Her husband passed away and her children stay overseas. We decided to bring her down on a foldable, canvas stretcher. We had called up the police station, too, and they sent an ambulance. She was brought down and shifted into the ambulance, but she was feeling breathless by then,” recounted Pinaki Narayan Ganguly, another resident.
Ganguly’s parents-in-law stay in the same building and they needed to be shifted out as well.
“My mother-in-law is 77 years old and my father-in-law turned 85 some months ago. Me and my son took them up to the terrace. Being a COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) patient myself, I was finding it difficult to breathe. But there was no way I could go out,” Ganguly said. His son Rahul, whose wedding is on Wednesday, kept rushing them out and helped with the general evacuation.
While the beauty and wellness centre is closed on Sundays, residents called up two of their staffers, who then rushed to the spot. Firefighters broke the large glass panes to allow the smoke to escape. For the next two hours, five fire tenders kept battling the blaze, which gutted almost the entire commercial space on the first floor.
“Primarily, it seemed that the fire originated from a short circuit. We are waiting for the fire brigade to find out what exactly happened. The building does have fire-safety arrangements, like sprinklers, so we need to know how the flames spread inside the commercial space despite that,” Bansal said.
Web Source: The Nation