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Fire extinguishers seen on factory walls, locals say found buckets of sand too
New Delhi: On Tuesday, when the police opened the five-storey building in north Delhi’s Anaj Mandi, where a blaze had killed 43 people on Sunday, a fire extinguisher
New Delhi: On Tuesday, when the police opened the five-storey building in north Delhi’s Anaj Mandi, where a blaze had killed 43 people on Sunday, a fire extinguisher was found affixed to the wall on the ground floor of the building. Area residents also said they had found six buckets of sand in the building when they had gone in for the initial rescue operation.
This development is in contrast to the contents of the first information report (FIR), filed on the statement of a head constable, that no firefighting equipment was found in the building on the day of the fatal fire.
On Tuesday, a police team had taken the arrested manager into the building as part of its ongoing probe into the incident. A fire extinguisher was found pinned to a wall towards the end of a gallery on the ground floor. In any case, the ground floor was unaffected by the blaze, and firefighters said most deaths had occurred on the second and third floors of the building.
The police did not respond to this finding, but Atul Garg, director of Delhi Fire Services, said when his men had entered the building Sunday morning, they had not come across any such equipment.
“It could be possible that the rescuers did not notice it, but it is anyway difficult to operate a fire extinguisher. Building occupants may not have known how to operate the equipment or they may not even have known that it existed,” Garg said.
Some residents said when they had entered the building, about 10-15 minutes before firefighters came in, they had found six buckets of sand on the ground floor, close to where the electrical meters were installed.
“I took a bucket upstairs and threw the sand on the flames. But, by then, the fire had spread too much for the sand to have any impact,” Mohammad Umar, an electrician, who was among initial rescuers who rushed into the building around 5.10am on Sunday, said.
Another resident, who didn’t want to identify himself, said when he went to the second floor to rescue people, he said a drum containing a large quantity of glue, kept right under an electric board, was afire. “The glue appeared to be on fire and was emitting dense smoke. I ran downstairs to save myself,” he said.
