In a second major fire mishap witnessed in the metropolis in less than a month, seven persons were charred to death inside a lift and 25 others injured elsewhere when a massive fire engulfed the 14th and 15th floors of an upmarket 22-storey building ‘lake Home’ at Powai’s Chandivli locality in north Mumbai on Saturday evening.
The fire brigade personnel rescued as many as 22 residents trapped in the fire that broke out at 6.14 pm in the phase-three building of lake Home society. After battling with the blaze for more than three and a half hours, the fire brigade personnel brought the fire under control at around 10 pm. “All the seven persons killed in the mishap were in the lift. They were trying to get out of the building using the lift, but were trapped inside the lift. As a result, they were charred to death,” Mumbai fire brigade’s acting fire chief PS Rahangdale said.
Rahangale said that the persons trapped inside the lift must have died even before the fire brigade arrived on the scene. “lake Home is a 22-storey building. The fire broke out on the 14th floor. In all, we rescued 22 people trapped on various floors of the building,” he said. The intensity and spread of the blaze could be gauged from the fact that as many as 15 fire engines and water tenders were used by the fire brigade personnel in the extinguishing operation, in which the rescuers used snorkels and ladders to rescue the trapped residents.
“The deaths that have taken place in this mishap are akin to the one witnessed in ‘Mont Blanc’ building at Camps Corner in December 2013,” Rahangale said. All the injured persons, excepting one critically injured person, were rushed to the nearby Hiranandani Hospital. The persons with severe burn wounds, was taken to National Burns Centre at Airoli in Navi Mumbai. Saturday’s was the second major fire mishap that Mumbai has witnessed in less than a month. Earlier on May 10, four fire officers, including chief fire officer Sunil Nesarikar, were killed and six others injured when a major fire swept through a four-storey building “Gokul Niwas” in the congested downtown area of Kalbadevi in south Mumbai.
The mishaps in high-rise buildings are not new to Mumbai. Earlier on, a 35-year-old fireman Nitin Baburao Inglekar was killed and 20 of his colleagues were injured while battling a massive blaze that had engulfed the two upper-most floors of a 22-storey commercial building “lotus Business Park” at Andheri in north Mumbai on July 18, 2014.
On October 18, 2009, six firemen were choked to death on a Diwali day, when they went to rescue residents trapped inside a 14-storey building of the Kalpavriksha complex at Samata Nagar locality at Thane. later, on December 14, 2013, six personnel of the Mumbai fire brigade, including two officers, were injured in a major that broke out in a 26-storey building Mont Blanc” at Camps Corner in south Mumbai.