Four firefighters lost their lives and 13 others including 11 firefighters were wounded when the roof of a factory, where the fire had raged for 18 hours, collapsed in the North Karachi Industrial Area early on Thursday.
40-year-old Mohsin Sharif, 40-year-old Khalid Shahzad, 35-year-old Sohail and 55-year-old Muhammad Afzal were the firemen who lost their lives when the roof collapsed during the cooling process. The inferno comes exactly a month after a multi-storey building on Karachi’s main traffic artery, Sharae Faisal, went up in flames. Luckily, no human life was lost in that incident.
The fire erupted in a bedsheet factory in the Gabol Town area on Wednesday night and with the adjacent factory also catching fire. It later reached a nearby factory manufacturing motorcycle parts, according to the fire department.
Around 10 fire tenders were involved in bringing the towering inferno throughout Wednesday night and Thursday morning. By Thursday morning the flames had simmered down and the firemen were busy in the cooling process when the roof collapse occurred.
Rescue service volunteers present on the site retrieved the bodies and survivors from the debris and rushed them to Abbasi Shaheed Hospital.
Safety gear ‘missing’
The families of the deceased firemen told the media that firemen are not provided basic equipment as well as fire-resistant uniforms and helmets.
“The department did not provide him even the uniform and helmet. Mohsin died of head injury because he did not have the firemen’s helmet,” his mother Nasreen Hussain said. “If the fire department had provided my son a helmet, he would be with us now.”
She said that her son had not been paid salaries for the past several months while his overtime for two and a half years was also pending.
“It was like hell,” said injured fireman Abdul Hakeem. “The flames kept erupting during the cooling process and we were there trying to douse the blazes when suddenly the roof came crashing down.”
The cause of the fire and subsequent collapse remains under investigation. Gabol Town police station SHO Muhammad Saqlain said that they had started investigation.
Governor Kamran Tessori visited the site and assured compensation to the victims. He also ordered immediate assistance for the injured.
Compensation demanded
The funeral prayers for three firemen, including Khalid Shehzad and Muhammad Afzal, were held at the Shah Faisal Fire Station.
Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) Karachi chief Hafiz Naeemur Rehman attended the funeral and later offered condolences to heirs of the victims. He paid tributes to firefighters and urged the government to immediately compensate families.
At that time, firemen said that those who lost their lives during firefighting operations in 2007 and 2011 were yet to receive compensation apart from burial money till date.
They said that officers get promotions but drivers, firemen and hawaldars don’t get promoted. “We don’t even have uniforms,” they told the JI leader.
They alleged that clerks of the department demand bribes of Rs10,000 to Rs15,000 to forward their file for promotion review before the departmental committee.
The fire department also does not provide employment to children of the martyred firemen under the deceased quota, they added.
Published in The Express Tribune, April 14th, 2023.
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