Firemen waited for blaze to come down
Raihan Sabuktagin
Fire fighters could not douse the flames on upper floors of Bashundhara City shopping complex in the capital yesterday as they do not have required logistics and equipment to tame a blaze beyond 13th floor of a building.
Despite reaching the spot immediately after the fire broke out, they had nothing to do but watch it helplessly.
Later, they started drenching the lower floors of the high-rise and adjacent small buildings to save those from being engulfed by fire. And they just waited until the flames came down to 13th floor raging through the six upper floors.
“We are capable of putting out fire up to 13th floor of a building by using our TTL (turntable ladder). But the fire at Bashundhara broke out on 19th floor,” said Motiur Rahman, a fire fighter, who was trying to operate the faulty hydrant system at Bashundhara City.
Until last year, Fire Service and Civil Defence department could fight fire up to seventh floor. It bought the TTL after the inferno at 11-storey BSEC building.
The higher authorities appear to have learnt little from the previous fire incidents at high-rises in the capital, resulting in the lack of preparedness to face recurrence of such fire.
Successive governments neglected the need for building an efficient fire fighting system for the capital.
The city now has 12 fire stations equipped with about 20 vehicles including water carrying lorries and pick-up vans for carrying pumps. The number of stations, workforce and equipment is too small to provide service to the 1,530- square kilometre city, fire service officials said.
“There is only one fire fighter for every 30,000 people in the city, and lack of water sources in it is another major problem,” one official said.
And only a couple of the city’s fire stations have ‘chemical tender’ (a fire fighting device loaded with dry powder, carbon-dioxide gas, foam, etc to fight chemical fires).
Seeking anonymity, the official said, “The number of fire stations in the city has remained the same since independence, and the number of fire fighters at the 12 stations has declined to 242 from 264 despite a phenomenal growth of the city.”
According to fire service officials, fires damage property worth around Tk 725 crore a year in the country. But they could not give any estimate of losses to fire in the capital, saying they do not have any information cell.
A fire service control room source however said 70 percent of the reported fire incidents in the country took place in Dhaka and Chittagong.
Contacted, Brig Gen Abu Naim Md Shahid Ullah, director general of Fire Service and Civil Defence, said damage to property worth around Tk 725 crore in fire is reported annually, but lot more goes unreported. “I believe that the real amount of damage due to fire is many times more,” he added.
Due to industrial growth, the likelihood of chemical fire has increased but the department does not have equipment to fight chemical fire, Naim pointed out.
He emphasised implementation of Fire Prevention and Dousing Act 2003 (Ogni Protirodh O Nirbapon Ain-2003) and the amended Building Construction Act 1952 by conducting drives against violators of those.
Courtesy of www.thedailystar.net
