Bangalore:
Nine people dead, 59 injured. 22 people are still in hospital, many of them in critical condition. (
Feb 23: Bangalore fire doused, 9 dead, 59 injured)
When a fire began on a busy Tuesday at Bangalore's Carlton Towers, close to 200 people were in the building at the different offices that rent space here.
Smoke alarms didn't sound, and sprinkler showers did not gush into action. Fire safety officials are investigating why. The building's owners face police cases of negligence and culpable homicide not amounting to murder. (
Read: Did lapses lead to deaths?)
But they also have other questions to answer. Among them, did three people who died after jumping from the building follow the instruction of fire-fighters?
Several eyewitnesses tell NDTV that the saw firefighters asking people trapped on the top floors of the seven-storey building to jump. When they did, the safety net below collapsed. "The public and the fire personnel told them to jump...but when they did, they could not hold on to them ..." said a witness, Mohammed Riyaz. (
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Fire safety officials deny this. "That is absolute rubbish. By the time the fire people came, most of the people had already jumped. People who were around - five to six thousand people easily were there and police were also hard put to control them - curiosity mongers - they were also hampering operations a lot. They just asked people to jump and they did not have the technical skill, they were not trained... No firemen were involved," says Jija Harisingh, Head of Fire and Emergency Services.
While that's being investigated, what cannot be argued is that the rescue operations seemed amateur at best. 22 fire engines were summoned to Carlton Towers. The first few reached within 15 minutes, the others were delayed by huge traffic jams, many nearest the building caused by a large crowd that gathered to watch rescue efforts. " I guess the traffic officers tried to clear the road, but the strategy should have been cutting the road traffic on one line, and allowing the emergency vehicles to move unhindered - that did not happen ...by the time they cleared, it was sadly too late," says Harisingh.
There was just one ladder high enough to reach the top floors. It arrived after the high-point of the crisis. That meant people on the top floors were exposed to dangerous amounts of smoke.
"Initially everybody was panicking. Security guys - I think nobody - knew what to do in the event of such a situation. Probably training was less. We saw everyone running around helplessly below and we were just trapped into the smoke. We tried to hold our breath and come through the smoke but we couldn't. So we came back and got trapped by the windows," recalls Sanjay Maniangode, who managed to escape.
For now, a blame game is adding to the disaster. "Rescue operations became difficult because the building norms were not followed. We could have saved many lives had the norms been followed," said P S Sandhu, Inspector General of Police, Fire and Emergency Services.
Carlton Towers had been inspected for fire safety and had been passed basic tests, say investigating officials. That puts the onus on local municipal officials, who've visited the building on Wednesday morning and will file a report on what they found.