Kolkata hotel fire eyewitnesses recount harrowing ordeal

Kolkata: When 69-year-old Bipin Ganatra reached one of the rooms on the third floor of the Rituraj Hotel in central Kolkata along with the fire-fighters to search for survivors around 3am on Wednesday, he found two kids and their father trapped in the room. They were all dead, he said.

“While the boy was lying on the bed, the girl’s body was found near the toilet door. Their father was lying in the toilet. They were all dead. The bodies were not charred. They all possibly choked to death because of the smoke,” said Ganatra, a voluntary firefighter who received Padma Shri for his work in 2017, told HT.

In all, 14 persons, including a woman and two children, were killed when a fire broke out in the six-storey hotel late on Tuesday night.

“The fire started on the first floor. One of the hotel owners, Akash Chawla, started pouring buckets of water to douse the flames. Gradually when the flames started spreading, he asked us to alert the boarders and vacate the building,” said Dasarath Das, an employee of the hotel.

As the smoke and the fire started spreading, panic struck the boarders and the staff of the hotel. They all started running to save their lives.

“In the melee we heard a loud thud. When we looked down, we saw it was Manoj Paswan, a hotel staff. He had jumped from the third floor out of panic and died,” Das added.

Preliminary investigation has revealed that while Paswan died after jumping from the third floor, the rest died due to asphyxiation.

“Most of the bodies were found either in the rooms, or in the common space. None were charred. They had all died due to the smoke,” said another staff.

Another staff, Amalendu Naskar, said that most of the boarders and the hotel staff ran towards the terrace as the smoke and fire had engulfed both the stairways. Climbing down was impossible. There was thick smoke in the staircase and the temperature was rising every second. There were 25 of us. We all reached the terrace from where we were rescued.”

Neha Agarwal, a resident of Odisha who had come to Kolkata on a vacation with her family, recounted how she along with her husband and nephew got trapped on the fourth floor.

“One of my relatives had gone down to buy something. He called us and said the hotel was on fire and we should come down immediately. When we opened the door of the room, the entire corridor was filled with thick smoke. We couldn’t see anything, nor could we breathe. We closed the door and ran back to the room. My husband broke open the window and we climbed down on the sunshade. We waited there for almost two hours before the fire brigade rescued us,” Agarwal told the media.

Locals who joined the firefighting and rescue said that people had come out of their rooms through the windows and some waited on the sunshades.

“We could hear them screaming. Some were waving their hands to attract the attention of the firefighters. Thick smoke was billowing out of some of the windows. We were all standing on the road. All we could do was to shout at the top of our voice and ask the trapped hoteliers to stay calm till help arrived,” said Sandip Bhardwaj, a local shopkeeper.

Locals said that as the hotel was undergoing some repair and renovation work, one of the exits was blocked with construction materials such as plywood boards. Some of the windows were also sealed leaving very less ventilation for the smoke to escape.

“The fire broke out on the first floor where some renovation and repair work were going on. Plywood and other combustible materials were stacked there. The smoke engulfed the entire building. The smoke detectors and fire-fighting system didn’t work. The systems were totally defunct,” said Ranvir Kumar, director general of the state fire and emergency services.