Safety wiring duct flouted at Carlton Towers
BANGALORE: Carlton Towers is a classic case of Murphy’s Law: if anything can go wrong, it will. It’s a small miracle it wasn’t anycable trunking worse, given that 2,000 litres of diesel for 11 gensets was stored on the terrace and the blaze didn’t ignite the fuel and trigger a horrendous blast.
So what went wrong? Everything. The fire alarm didn’t go off. The sprinklers didn’t workplastic duct because there was no water. The fire exits were locked. The building cable trunking plan violations made fire-fighting difficult. Terribly shocking, but more lives could have been lost in the inferno at this building on the HAL Airport Road on Tuesday. Nothing seems to have duct worked when the flames struck at cables in the duct beside the ground-floor lift.
Both IGP, Fire & Emergency Services, duct P Sandhu and deputy director D Rasheed admit that none of the fire safety norms was in place. Sandhu said: “Stocking so much diesel in one place is a violation of rules. If the diesel had caught fire, it would have been disastrous. People were not trained in basic life-saving skills. There was a setback violation. We had to get water from a distance. If there was plastic duct water available here, things would have been different. There was no training because none of them knew the escape routes. People should be aware of fire safety norms and after the no-objection certificate was given, fire checks and audits should have been done. But they were not done.”
