Despite conducting fire safety awareness, the fire department keeps looking the other way with many shops running in the congested markets, including Paltan Bazaar, sans No Objection Certificates (NOC) from the fire department.
These places are sitting on veritable powder kegs that can spawn an inferno any time with the shops, huddled together, having no worthwhile fire-extinguishing or safety equipment meant to fight emergency.
A fire officer said that several shops are coming up in the narrow and congested streets in the busy market areas of Dehradun where the fire tenders may not reach swiftly on emergency calls. In most of these cases, had the owners of these shops or commercial establishments applied for NOCs in the department their applications would have been rejected on fire safety ground, he said.
As per the Central Government guidelines, all the commercial establishments, public and private offices should be constructed as per national building code, he stressed.
However, a critical refrain is running in the department officers who say they are not empowered to take action or impose penalty against the violators of the fire safety norms.
Dehradun fire station officer Shiv Prasad Mamgai said that among several proposals to the State Government, the fire service department has demanded the fire service officers be empowered to impose challan on such establishments which fail to implement the fire safety norms.
As of now, the department can only send notices to the establishments after those who own them are caught violating fire safety norms during inspection conducted by the officers, he added. “This is a must. We feel helpless while the violators take us easy, knowing that we cannot do anything to force them to adhere to the fire safety norms,” he said.