Acting on complaints received on Prime Minister's Portal, the Civil Defence Department (CDD) has penalised owners of 112 multi-storey commercial buildings and plazas on Murree Road and in the Sadiqabad and Cantonment areas for non-compliance fire safety guidelines.
The (CDD) had already served notices to the owners of these buildings after a fire at a cooking oil warehouse laid bare the lack of fire safety measures at industrial and commercial premises.
CDD District Officer Talib Hussain said the department has slapped a cumulative fine of Rs250,000 on the owners and management of these 112 buildings.
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Hussain said they have also re-issued red notices to the owners of 365 multi-storey commercial, non-commercial buildings, plazas and instructed them to install modern fire extinguishers in a week, install closed-circuit cameras in all routes of plazas, buildings as per SOP, make emergency exits, and arrange first-aid kits at the premises.
The Prime Minister's Portal teams checked the entire Murree Road from Faizabad to Saddar and inspected multi-storey plazas and markets of Saddar bazaar. They issued challans to owners of more than 100 shops and buildings due to lack of fire safety measures.
These challans were presented in the courts of Civil Judge Rizwan Hanif Sheikh and Civil Judge Abdul Sattar. The civil judges imposed a fine of Rs5,000 to Rs10,000 on each challan.
This grand operation will resume next week, Hussain said. The scope of this operation has been extended to other tehsils of Rawalpindi such as Murree, Kotli Sattiyan, Kahuta, Taxila, Gujjar Khan, Kallar Syedan.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 11th, 2020.
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