Kolkata:
The fire at Stephen House building on the busy Park Street in Kolkata broke out at the fifth floor of the building and spread to the sixth. LPG cylinders burst making matters worse. Twenty people have been rescued.
Fire engines with hydraulic ladders needed to rescue people trapped on the higher floors of the building reached the site more than an hour and a half after the fire began. Meanwhile, people trapped in the building slithered down ropes, used ducts to climb down, jumped on the ledges and parapets.
Pratim Chatterjee, Minister, Fire & Emergency Services said the ladders reached late because the Kolkata traffic made faster travel impossible. "It takes one hour to cover a 15 km journey, that is why the delay took place in the fire tenders reaching there."
The minister said, "We have three ladders we are using, one of them we brought from Europe." He said 45 fire tenders had been rushed to the spot, and "everything is now operational." Each of the 45 ladders at the site could carry 14 kilolitres of water.
He refused to hazard a guess on how many people were trapped inside the building. It is very difficult to say how many people would be there as the building. He said it was very difficult to search for people.