One dead in city’s fourth fire in three days

Karachi

A security guard died while 15 people were rescued in an unconscious condition after two blazes broke out in a building in Clifton, within a space of few hours, on Sunday. The incident was the fourth to have been reported in the city in only three days.

Apparently caused due to a blast in a gas pipeline, the fire broke out on the sixth floor of the Diamond Plaza building at around 4:30am. 

Found to be out of adequate resources to battle the three intense fires which broke out in the city on Friday, the fire department’s incompetence was again brought to the fore after the only snorkel the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) had to offer could not reach beyond the sixth floor of the building, to rescue those trapped on the eighth storey; they had to reach the snorkel through ropes.

Fifteen fire tenders and a snorkel were provided by the central fire station, while four fire trucks were sent in by the DHA and two by Bahria Town.

The security guard was identified as 30-year-old Arshad Ali Khan.

According to chief fire officer, Tehseen Ahmed, two snorkels were not operational but would soon be repaired. Cause of the fire was yet to be known.

Questions over ineptness of the city’s fire fighting system were raised once again as some fire tenders ran out of water while others failed to reach a spot on time as massive fires engulfed three factories in separate industrial areas, on Friday.

While fires at two factories, located in SITE and Hawkesbay areas respectively, were successfully put out, fire fighters despite a lapse of over nine hours struggled to extinguish the one that broke out in a tyre factory in Gulbai.

Fifteen people were said to have been present in the tyre factory at the time of the fire, however, all of them had rushed to the rooftop.

A large quantity of medicines perished in the fire that erupted in the factory situated in Hawkesbay while a loss of millions of rupees was reported from a chemical factory that caught fire in SITE, near Ghani Chowrangi.