By IANS,
Kolkata : Relatives of AMRI Hospital fire victims Friday evening alleged that the fire fighters arrived two hours late and were initially ill-equipped – without masks and with only rickety manual lifts – to deal with the disaster. Fire Minister Javed Khan, however, denied the charge.
“The administration is hopeless, useless. They (firemen) came with manual ladders. Had the sky lift come earlier, many people could have been saved,” said Pradeep Sarkar, whose father-in-law was admitted there Thursday night with a heart ailment.
He said the sky lift came only around 7 a.m. – nearly three and a half hours after thye blaze broke out.
“The fire brigade reached at 5.30-6 a.m. What took them so long only god knows,” said Prasanta Ray, a local.
The minister, however, rubbished the allegations and insisted the fire tenders reached AMRI by 4.20 a.m., within an hour of the fire breaking out.
“It is totally a baseless allegation. The fire broke out at 3.30 a.m. The fire brigade was informed at 4.10 a.m. and the fire tender engines reached the spot 4.20 a.m.,” Khan told IANS.
More than 70 patients in the well-known Kolkata hospital were killed along with three staffers when the blaze started in the basement of the annexe building early Friday and toxic fumes quickly spread to the other floors, trapping hundreds of people.
The tragedy unfolded over many hours as patients were suffocated to death, some trapped in their beds, others dying in their sleep, too infirm to escape the smoke and fire.
The lucky few were brought down the side of the four-storey glass facade building, built only six years back, using ropes and ladders as thousands looked on in horror.