A mother hugged her dying children, an elderly couple clung to each other, a woman found dead in toilet

As rescuers made their way into the burning three storey building in outer Delhi’s Prem Nagar on Monday came across the dead. The way they were found captured seemed

As rescuers made their way into the burning three storey building in outer Delhi’s Prem Nagar on Monday came across the dead. The way they were found captured seemed to have captured their final moments.

HT Image

“On the first floor of the house, we had to break open the door of a room that was locked from inside. A man (Uday Kant Choudhary) was lying unconscious on one edge of the bed. His wife, Muskan, had hugged her three young children and covered them under heaps of blankets and bed sheets. She was trying to save her children from the smoke,” said Ajay Kumar Sharma, assistant divisional fire officer (ADO) who led the rescue operation.

On the second floor, there were the bodies of three persons burnt beyond immediate recognition, including that of an elderly couple. “I saw two charred bodies clinging to each other,” said Divesh Pathak, a local who was among the first respondents. The police later identified them as the building owner, Ram Chander Jha, 65, his wife Sudheera Devi, 58.

By the end, the police said, three were charred to death and six died of asphyxiation. They will await the autopsy report to conclude this because the doctors have mentioned injuries on the bodies of all the nine dead.

THE HOUSE AND THE FIRE

Constructed on a 50 square yard plot four years ago, the house had been serving as a godown for fabrics on its ground floor at a monthly rent of ₹4,000 for the last four months.

DCP (Rohini), SD Mishra, said that short circuit in an electric board in the godown triggered the blaze and the presence of a large stack of garments led to the fire spreading quickly.

The building had a single staircase and had two rooms each on its first and second floors. One room on the first floor was occupied by tenants, Choudhary and Muskan, and their three children. The building owner and his family occupied the other three rooms.

Employed with a private firm, Choudhary, whose mother had died in a house collapse in Bihar six years ago, had returned home from Prime Minister’s Narendra Modi’s rally shortly before midnight. He and the occupants had stayed up late on Sunday after a feast in the neighbourhood.

At 12.10am, neighbour Divesh Pathak, smelled something burning and came out to find smoke bellowing from the godown. Soon, people on the second floor were screaming for help.

THE RESCUE

Pathak and others tried to open the iron gates on the ground floor, but found them locked from inside. “While some of us used hammers to try and break the doors, others switched on their submersible water pumps to douse the flames,” said Pathak.

Meanwhile, the fire department dispatched three fire tenders from Rohini Sector 5. They reached in 17 minutes, but found the lanes too narrow and congested. “There were vehicles parked in those narrow lanes. We tried to wake up residents to remove the vehicles, but to no use. Our men then used their hands to move them aside and make way for the fire tenders,” said ADO Sharma.

Local residents on the other hand, had used an adjacent building to carry a ladder to the terrace from where they managed to rescue Pooja and two girls. “One of those girls (Pooja’s three-year-old daughter, Aradhya) had suffered severe burns to her hands because she caught hold of the red-hot staircase railing. The faces of Pooja and her niece, Soumya, were black with soot,” said Rajesh Kumar, a neighbour.

While the house owner and his family were making efforts to escape, the tenants had locked themselves inside their room, believing that it would save them from the dense smoke. Inside, they called their relatives and neighbours and made frantic appeals for help. “Around 12.30am, I received two calls from my aunt, Muskan. She begged me to rescue them and said that someone had locked them from outside,” said Muskan’s nephew, Gopal.

But the ADO and the DCP said that Muskan’s door was locked from inside.

CYLINDER BLAST

By the time the fire fighters entered the building to rescue the trapped people, the building had heated up. “The heat was such that a gas cylinder on the terrace of the second floor blasted a large hole in the side wall. It severel injured people inside. Two of our fire fighters too were injured,” said ADO Sharma.

The impact had left crack on the building. Another building, 30 feet away, bore marks of debris crashing against it.

“We knew of more gas cylinders inside the building. We feared they would explode next and ran from the street to save ourselves,” said Durganand Thakur, a neighbour. ADO Sharma said that had there been another cylinder blast, the building could have come down. “In the nick of time, we brought out a burning cylinder”.

The fire fighters had also tried to revive the unconscious people by administering cardio pulmonary resuscitation (CPR), but in vain, said Atul Garg, director of fire department.

ADO Sharma said that he found two electric cables hanging from the building, prompting him to suspect that it was short-circuit in a metre box. As is found in many houses that have caught fire, the electric metres boxes of this house were located on the staircase.