Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Prevent fire' that was published in Newsband

Prevent fire

Fire safety norms for hospitals are needed. The devastating fire at the Andheri hospital of the Employees State Insurance Corporation in Mumbai killed at least eight people. This show how much low priority fire safety gets in India. This calls into question the precautions taken by the authorities.

The Fire Department says that the hospital had failed an inspection recently and was served a notice. ESIC is a welfare organisation working to protect the health and well-being of the labour sector. The Andheri horror evokes memories of the AMRI hospital blaze in Kolkata seven years ago, in which 92 people died. This year, critically ill patients had to be carried outside by relatives during a fire at the Calcutta Medical College and Hospital.

Minimum requirements for multi-storeyed structures are alarms, sprinkler systems, specified-width staircases, smoke barrier enclosures and checks against storage of combustible materials in areas where patients are kept.

Priority should be given to human health not money. Huge number of hospitals presently busy in making money not in saving lives of people. It is now the second incident occurred due to carelessness of hospital authorities. After failing the inspection why the department flagged them to go forward? Both hospital authorities and fire departments should be questioned.

There are simple instructions in engineering that regular inspection of a building or any property can be done internally or externally by authorized security officials not only on fire but also on normal work. Defects can also be rectified in maintenance. Which is only 5 to 10 percent of the total cost. This practice is very easy to be followed.

The mother of all these fires is the Uphaar cinema fire. It took decades for anybody to be convicted and when it came time for punishment, the Supreme Court let the guilty go free. We have a legal system where the guilty are never punished. And, we then claim to be shocked every time there is negligence.

Coming back to the fire at Andheri - According to the staff union, mishaps are not new in the hospital. In March, there was a fire in the hospital’s kitchen and four days before the incident, a Cobra emerged out of the scrap lying on the premises. A union member said that after the snake emerged, he wrote to the hospital management to clear the scrap. The management then wrote to the NBCC contractor, but nothing happened. Small fires are a routine occurrence. But eight people have lost their lives.

Why did the hospital not have CCTV cameras, a disaster management protocol? The condition of the staff quarters has been pathetic for years now. Why didn’t the administration penalise the contractor for the repeated delays? The hospital building, constructed in the 1970s, neither has a fire brigade NOC nor an occupation certificate from the MIDC. It did not have fire-fighting equipment except fire extinguishers.

The MIDC fire brigade has only one fire station in SEEPZ for the entire industrial area. When asked about challenges during Monday’s firefighting, they said the biggest challenge was that of bedridden patients. They brought down most of the patients on their shoulders. Both fire brigades worked in tandem.

Union Minister of State for Labour and Employment Santosh Kumar Gangwar said that the State government would conduct an inquiry and submit a report to the Central government. This is a very unfortunate incident.