Fire at Karachi’s Regent Plaza hotel on Monday killed at least 12 people with more than 100 others injured. It is always painful to know that people have lost their lives in a tragic incident. But it hurts more when you realize that with better management and planning lost lives could have been saved.
We are familiar with incidents like this, because they are happening quite often these days, in which uncontrolled fire erupts in some high building or a poorly constructed factory in densely populated area. And at the time when building catches fire, some helpless victims still trapped inside. Most of the buildings in Pakistan lack emergency exit route, with little or no fire-fighting equipment and in case of emergency people remain stranded inside. In such cases fire department faces great difficulty to bring situation under control.
It takes an excessive amount of time to control fire in some situations; especially job becomes hard to put out blaze in multi-floor building. It is tragic that safety bye-laws are being ignored even in big cities. Skyscrapers are mushrooming, but it seems concerned government department is not concerned at all to check the safety measures in these high buildings. In recent fire erupting incident in Karachi, people jumped from windows of six-storey hotel in panic. Despite these repeated tragedies nothing seems to change for the better.
Other issue is the poor condition of fire department; it is operating with very few fire tenders and with staff that lacks modern techniques and training to deal with any unfortunate incidents. Workers in fire department need to be aware with sophisticated life-saving methods. But unfortunately they are performing their duties after rudimentary training. Fire-fighters are special people, who put their lives on risk just to secure others. Concerned authorities should arrange their training sessions to provide them with modern techniques.
Govt needs to strictly implement building bye-laws along with improving fire-fighting department.
