20130921 Bangladesh Fire displaces 58 families in capital
Bangladesh Sep 20 2013 “Apartment houses” “Factories” “Houses”
Dead : dead 0 or unknown Burnout : 30 to 69 Injured : injured 0 or unknown
Fire displaces 58 families in capital
Updated: 2013-09-22
Suruj Miah breaks down in tears holding some charred garment items of the factory he had set up taking out a loan at Kamrangirchar in Dhaka. A fire yesterday afternoon burned down his factory as well as at least 50 houses in the area
A massive fire lasting more than two hours reduced to ashes 10 houses made of wood and tin sheets at Rasulpur in the capital’s Kamrangirchar yesterday.
There were no human casualties but the blaze left about 58 low-income families like those of garment factory workers and rickshaw pullers homeless.
Five units of fire fighters rushed in some 15 minutes after the fire began around 12:55pm.
The fire fighters carried four water pumps, which would have been sufficient to control the fire as a channel of the Buriganga river runs along the area, said Enayat Hossain, senior station officer of Fire Service and Civil Defence, Lalbagh. “But our pumps could not lift water, as the river was filled with earth and garbage,” he told The Daily Star.
Enayet said they could not extinguish the flames until two and a quarter hours later due to unavailability of water in the river as well as in the area, which should have taken less than an hour. By then the fire had engulfed the 10 houses, mostly two-storey, he said.
Enayat, however, praised the locals who in their hundreds had rushed to the scene with buckets and pitchers full of water.
The fire started from a short circuit in one Maqsuda Begum’s house, but none was hurt because almost everyone was out for work, said locals.
Three children had got trapped inside Maqsuda’s house but they escaped by wrapping themselves with blankets, said locals.
Mohammad Rajon, 15, eldest of the children, told The Daily Star that when the fire began, he woke up with a start because of the heat.
“My house was on the ground floor. When I got out, I saw two little girls, ages 7 and 4, come running down from the first floor. We wrapped quilts around us and ran out.”
Meanwhile, many residents, who had fled their homes for the fire, came back only to find their houses looted, said locals.
When one Sabina Begum came back with her two children, she found her house unscathed by the fire but vandalised by looters. “My safe was broken and 6 tolas of gold and several thousand taka were gone,” she said.
FIRE AT MOGHBAZAR
Another fire broke out on the seventeenth floor of the eighteen-storey Rokeya Tower at the capital’s Boro Moghbazar yesterday but did not cause any human casualties.
The fire started around 5:05pm from an electric short circuit and was extinguished fifteen minutes later.
FIRE AT BANGSHAL
A shoe factory housed on the third and fourth floor of a five-storey building was gutted completely in an hour-long fire on the capital’s Bangshal road yesterday.
Three units of fire fighters subdued the blaze, the source unknown, about an hour after it began on the third floor around 11:45am. None was hurt.
Websource:The Daily Star
http://www.thedailystar.net/beta2/news/fire-displaces-50-families-in-kamrangirchar/
Date:2013-09-22
Country:Bangladesh