Poor synergy exposes IIA emergency preparedness

The lack of requisite information could have led to a mishap at the Islamabad International Airport (IIA) on Sunday after a fire emergency arose.

The airport staff seemed clueless about the supervision of a locked room which could have possibly caught fire after the fire safety alarms rang.

Sources told The Express Tribune that an emergency alarm near the office of a private airliner on level-one started ringing on Sunday, signalling the possibility of a fire. Responding to this, the fire safety teams at the airport rushed to the site. Noting that the door of the room was locked, the safety teams inquired about its keys from Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) officials.

However, the ANF officials said that they did not have control of the room and it was used by some other department.

In such a situation, the safety teams approached the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) officials to inquire about keys to the door but they failed to produce it as well.

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As the last resort, rescue teams smashed the lock on the door to combat the fire inside. They discovered a short circuit in the electrical wiring and fixed it before it could turn into a major blaze.

When the fire safety officials inquired about who was in charge of the room from CAA officials present at the site, they were clueless about it and said that all they knew was that the room was used as a store and that they had no knowledge where its keys were.

When The Express Tribune asked CAA Division Spokesperson Abdul Sattar Khokar about the incident, he said that they were informed by the IIA manager who said that the related office was allotted to the Pakistan Customs.

Customs had replaced the door lock and hence it couldn’t be opened with a master key.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 24^th, 2020.