​Fire and smoke: on fire-safety norms and buildings in India 

Fourteen people, two of them children, were killed and 13 injured in a hotel fire in the Mechua market area of Burrabazar in central Kolkata on Tuesday. The fire engines had trouble accessing the congested area. It appears, yet again, that many of the victims were asphyxiated — smoke is as much a deadly killer as the flames themselves. Smoke quickly rises up and escape would require reaching the bottom areas of the building. The six-storey hotel had only one stairway, and the fire that broke out on the first floor cut off escape. One person died after jumping from the building. That there were no other accessible means of escape is, in and of itself, a violation of fire safety norms. On Thursday, a similar tragedy unfolded in Rajasthan’s Ajmer, a historic town. Fire broke out in a five-storey hotel in which four persons died. Some guests tried to jump out of the windows, and fire engines had trouble accessing the congested area.

Devastating fires in congested buildings leading to tragic loss of lives and property have become a disturbingly routine phenomenon across India, especially in Kolkata. There, Opposition leaders have rightly listed at least eight major fires in the last decade and half, starting with the AMRI hospital fire in 2011 that claimed 89 lives. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has spoken about a gas cylinder explosion after the Tuesday fire. She too has talked about there being only one staircase. Ms. Banerjee has characterised such fires as accidents that could not have been prevented. But the tragedies, in Ajmer and Kolkata, were entirely preventable and mitigation could have been far more efficient. Many of India’s cities and inner cities of metropolises continue to see high volume business activities but their safety features are outdated. They do not comply with current fire and structural safety norms. Fire escapes and emergency exits are non-existent and the structures use highly flammable materials from another era. Unlike other metropolises that have seen some redevelopment of inner cities in recent decades, Kolkata seems to have missed that phase. Immediate solutions can include maintaining low-height sidewalks to allow fire engines to get closer to building fronts, retrofitting fire retardant materials in buildings, and considering the use of retractable metallic staircases to serve as emergency escapes outside the buildings after careful evaluation by fire safety authorities. There is also a case for equipping firefighting teams with more breathing apparatuses so more personnel can rescue people in distress in such structures since their limited access routes may be smoke-filled.