Fire-fighting system was not working: Fire brigade

MUMBAI: The Link Square shopping complex that went up in flames in Bandra on Tuesday was a tinder box waiting to be lit. This damning preliminary finding comes from the Mumbai Fire Brigade a day after 72 fire fighters took 12 hours to contain the raging blaze and 22 hours to extinguish it.

“The fire-fighting system wasn’t working, including the sprinklers,” chief fire officer, Ravi Ambulgekar, told HT on Wednesday. An assistant divisional fire officer, who was at the site on Tuesday, added that the system was not working even though the shopping complex regularly submitted Form B, which shows evidence of a working system. “It is possible it was a manual system, which would have to be operated from the basement, but that wasn’t accessible. The fire alarm kept ringing till 3pm on Tuesday,” he said.

The fire is believed to have started in the basement, a large area occupied by popular electronics store Croma. It started in the wee hours on Tuesday, and escalated from a Level 1 fire to a Level 3 fire in just 40 minutes, and then to a Level 4 fire in just over two hours (Each level denotes the severity of a fire and the number of fire tenders that needs to be deployed).

The Link Square shopping complex, on Linking Road, housed 220 shops that sold all kinds of merchandise, ranging from clothes to accessories and electronics. There were also restaurants on the third floor.

The fire brigade says hordes of combustible material in the building fueled the fire’s ferocity. The intense heat and smoke in a contained space with poor ventilation made fighting the fire a tough challenge. It was also one reason it took so long to bring under control, said a fire officer present at the site.

The officer reasoned that the fire was already raging in the basement when it came to the attention of the security guard sleeping on the first floor after his shift ended at midnight. It was the security guard, Babulal Paswan, who made the first call to the fire brigade at 4:11am. When fire officers arrived, the blaze had already spread across the basement.

“I smelt the smoke,” said Paswan, “so I went down to check it but I could only catch glimpses of the fire behind the shutters. Smoke was all around, but there was no way for us security guards to use the extinguishers as we didn’t have the keys. So, we called the fire brigade.”

The flames spread rapidly through the three-storey building, leaping from the roof. A senior fire officer at the site said the stench of smoke was perceptible around 1km away, at the Khar Telephone Exchange. At 6:25am, it was declared a Level 4 fire.

“To start with, the topmost basement floor (where Croma was located) was aflame, which made the top floors like lava,” said the assistant divisional fire officer. “The heat and smoke were so intense, there was little room for the fire fighters – as many as 73 of them – to make much of a difference. The fire had by then reached all three top floors, fuelled by poor ventilation in a building encased in glass and filled with combustible material. We had to break the glass to allow the smoke to get out. The heat and smoke threatened to blind us each time we went too close, almost trapping a few of the fire officers,” he said.

The fire fighters focused on containing the blaze from all four sides. To venture closer, they deployed a fire robot to shoot water at the burning building. The fire was finally extinguished by 1:41am on Wednesday but cooling operations continued all through the day.

The fire brigade has launched an inquiry into the cause of the blaze and the irregularities in the building’s fire-fighting system.

The Mumbai Fire Brigade handed over the site to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Wednesday evening. The BMC and the police will take the next steps. “We have parked two fire engines at the site on standby since there is a huge pile of combustible material there. We are still investigating the cause of the fire and will have a report in two to three days,” said Ravindra Ambulgekar, chief fire officer.