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A preventable tragedy
- How many more lives must be lost before fire safety and rescue measures are taken seriously?
- Last year, 43 people died when fire gutted the fifth and sixth floors of the Stephen Court building in Kolkata.
- Now, again in Kolkata, more than 90 lives have been consumed by fire at the Advanced Medicare and Research Institute (AMRI) Hospitals at Dhakuria.
- This time it was even more heartbreaking — among those suffocated to death were many patients with restricted mobility.
- Only a few months ago, the fire service department had asked the hospital, a joint venture of two large industrial houses and the West Bengal government, to clear the encroachments in the basement and upgrade its fire safety mechanism.
- In the same hospital, there was a serious fire accident three years ago.
- When five major fire accidents occurred in large hospitals in London between January 2008 and February 2009, nobody died; in fact, not a single case of “significant adverse health effect” was reported.
- The central government's Standing Fire Advisory Council, whose recommendations were last updated in 1998, suggests that the response time — the period between alerting the fire station and the arrival of fire brigade at the accident location — must not be more than three minutes in the case of hazardous areas, and five minutes in others.
- The distribution of fire stations and their location within a large and congested city such as Kolkata need to be urgently reviewed.
