New Koilaghat building fire: FIR against ‘responsible authority’

Question: Why was power still on?

Smoke comes out of the windows of New Koilaghat building at 7.20am on Tuesday. A fire had broken out on the 13th floor around 8pm on Monday and spread to the floor below.: Picture by Bishwarup Dutta

Monalisa Chaudhuri And Kinsuk Basu   |   TT   |   Calcutta   |    10.03.21 : The New Koilaghat building that housed several railway offices and servers for ticketing across several parts of India lacked a fire certificate even after the state fire and emergency services department had notified some shortcomings following an inspection in 2015, fire department officials said.

Police on Tuesday filed an FIR against the “responsible authority” for causing death due to negligence and for contravention of provisions of fire prevention and safety norms at the Eastern Railways office in the New Koilaghat building.

A fire that started there on Monday evening killed nine and injured one.

Senior railway official Utpal Acharya, 58, is in the ICU of a railway hospital.

His office is on the 13th floor and he scampered down to the 10th floor when the fire was reported. But he went back upstairs to put away some documents under lock and key that he had left unlocked, a relative told Metro.

Acharya, a resident of Bhadreswar in Hooghly who has a history of COPD, was found in a semi-conscious state on the 13th floor and rescued with minor burns on his face.

Officials in the fire and emergency services department said the building did not have basic firefighting equipment like sprinklers, hydrants, a water pump, an alternative source of power and a fire-lift, that are mandatory for highrise buildings.

A senior fire department official said the building did not have a “fire certificate”, which is an NOC issued by the fire department after verifying that the building (or any establishment) has fire safety equipment as per its requirements.

Reacting to the allegations, a senior official of Eastern Railway said: “All the offices have fire extinguishers. But those are meant for low intensity fires. For high intensity fire, we have to call the fire brigade.”

The FIR was registered with Hare Street police station and the case has since been shifted to the detective department at Lalbazar for investigation.

The charges indicate that prima facie, the police and the fire department have found violations of maintenance of fire safety norms and regulations in the building that not just has offices on 14 floors but also houses the server room for online reservation for six railway divisions across a vast swathe of India.

A senior officer in Lalbazar said according to the preliminary opinion of the forensic team, the wiring of the floor was old and had decayed. “It appears that the wire covering melted because of overload and over-heating causing multiple short-circuits, including some in the server room,” the officer said.

The ambit of the probe will include the cause of the fire as well as the death of the nine people.

The charges slapped on the authorities of the building include non-bailable sections with a maximum punishment of five years in jail and a maximum fine amount of Rs 5 lakh.

The dead include four fire department personnel, four railway personnel and one Calcutta police assistant sub-inspector. Their bodies underwent post-mortem and were handed over to their relatives.

A senior official of the fire department said the authorities of the New Koilaghat building had applied for a fire NOC in 2013 following which the department had carried out an inspection and communicated a detailed list of recommendations of fire-safety measures to be implemented in the building in 2015. “There was no response from them after that,” said the senior official.

Questions have also surfaced about why the main power supply of the building was not turned off as soon as the fire was reported on the 13th floor.

“It was the responsibility of the competent authorities in the building to turn off the main power supply. Why should they wait for the fire brigade to come and do that?” said a senior official of the fire department who had been part of one of the firefighting teams on Monday.

Nine people had died in two elevators which were still operational when the building was on fire. Seven of them were in one elevator while two were found in another.

The post-mortems of all nine were conducted at SSKM hospital on Tuesday. The preliminary opinion suggested that the seven found inside and in front of one elevator had died of burns and the other two, found in another lift, had died after inhaling carbon monoxide and not from burn injuries.

A senior fire department officer said they had responded within three minutes of the call and had they taken longer, the outcome “could have been worse”.

The CPRO of the Eastern Railways said a “high-level enquiry” has been ordered to probe the cause of the incident and for making recommendations for necessary steps that need to be taken.

Calcutta police ASI Amit Kumar Bhawal, who was on motorcycle patrol duty from Hare Street police station and one of the first to respond to the situation, was honoured with a gun salute at the Lalbazar city police headquarters.

Compensation cheques of Rs 10 lakh each were handed to the relatives of the nine deceased persons by the state government.