LDA building fire

Imagine the plight of the families of the dead victims of the fire at LDA Plaza on May 9 in Lahore, who had to watch helplessly as their loved ones plunged to their deaths or waited in vain to be rescued. The death toll from the fire reached 23 with another 26 people injured, including rescuers, and took around 20 hours to douse. It also, once again, exposed the failure of the city administration to deal with an emergency situation like a fire, for which it should have the necessary equipment and training facilities fit for a metropolis. Instead, the scenes that one witnessed on live television were gruesome: rescuers scrambled to get those trapped in the building out, and then struggled to remove the charred bodies from the building. The bodies were burnt beyond recognition and their identification proved near impossible. All this while, families hoped against hope for a miracle which did not come, and according to some reports, neither did officials. Perhaps, here it is also noteworthy to mention that the electronic media needs to show some sensitivity when airing live incidents such as these in which people fell trying to escape the fire. Replaying these gruesome images on a loop is traumatic, to say the least, for the victims’ families, and especially so for children, and aids in the desensitisation of society.

Undoubtedly, when such incidents occur, the normal course of action is to order an inquiry whose findings will take months and will rarely be made public and be forgotten about all too quickly. We will never know the cause of the fire, the building’s safety measures, or lack thereof, and what could have been done to prevent the incident. This must not be the case this time. The building’s safety measures must be thoroughly examined and if they failed to provide the proper safety exits, the owners must be taken to task for the precious lives that have been lost here. It is equally important to examine the role of emergency services and the equipment they have on hand as, in this case, it proved sorely inadequate. There is a need to learn from such tragedies in order to avoid them in the future.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 13^th, 2013.