There goes a saying, ‘prevention is better than cure.’ The saying is true, theoretically only. Practically, it is otherwise, at least when it comes to the city’s fire safety concerns. The city believes in taking ‘no preventions’ and the Government in turn offers just ‘poor cure’ to douse the fire.
According to a senior official of the fire department not more than 20 buildings in Ranchi have procured No-objection Certificate (NOC) from the department.
He also said that the department had just 50 per cent of manpower than what is ideally required.
“As per the common practice builders are supposed to file the map for construction of the building to Ranchi Municipal Corporation. The corporation, before clearing the map sends the it to the fire department.
As per the requirements of the building we suggest fire safety measures to the builders. The builders then have to incorporate those safety measures. Once the construction is complete again the builders have to approach us. Then we see to ourselves if they had incorporated all the safety measures we had suggested and give NOC,” said the official.
He further revealed all the builders who go for approval of their map are ‘trapped’ into the suggestions of the fire department as the RMC sends their plan to the department. But once the map is cleared and the building is constructed they don’t get the final NOC from the department.
“And as of now there are not more than 20 buildings in the city that have got the legitimate NOC. And most of these buildings are the buildings of Multi-national Companies,” he said.
The summer is back and the building materials, electrical equipments and other inflammable stuff get heated because of the increased temperature. This activates building materials together with the dilapidated wiring and unguarded wire makes the city buildings prone to fire.
“If a building has followed the suggested safety norms there is arrangements of requires length of power-pumps, water storage. The fire tender vehicles that we carry to the site cannot carry more than 400 litre of water. This is not enough to douse the fire of even normal magnitudes,” he said.
When contacted and asked about the exact numbers of buildings in the city that are required to have procured NOC from fire department, RMC Town Planner said that he had no idea about the number of such buildings.
“I can just say that not all the buildings in the city are required to have the NOC. Any buildings covering 500 sq feet of ground area and up to a height of 15 meters has to get the NOC,” he said.