Burning records

There will be no let-up in building boom, care should be taken that regulations are followed in their construction.

The cause of the fire that broke out on the ninth floor of the 16-storey Shaheed-e-Millat building in Islamabad’s Blue Area on March 2, is as yet undetermined. The building was empty apart from three security guards at the time of the outbreak and there was little or nothing they could do to quench it. The fire started in the record room of the Estate Office, which, quite coincidentally, holds the files on houses and plots allocated to government employees. As yet, there is no suggestion of arson and the police are reportedly leaning towards the possibility of yet another accident. Once again, there is an indication that fire safety has failed. There does not appear to have been a working sprinkler system and the fire brigade showed up with equipment that was hardly fit for the purpose with published photographic evidence of its hoses spouting water from multiple punctures.

There may or may not be a thorough investigation, but if past form is anything to go by, the results are unlikely to see the light of day. Pakistan is enjoying a high-rise building boom and there is scarcely a city in the land that does not have a forest of multi-storey offices and residential complexes. Hundreds of thousands of people live and work in these buildings and few will know what built-in precautions there are to activate in the event of a fire. Even fewer will have regular fire-drills or practise evacuations and fire safety is often compromised by blocked emergency exits. When fire does break out, local fire brigades often have outdated and inappropriate equipment and access to fires is commonly blocked by encroachments and illegal barriers. There is going to be no let-up in the building boom and care should be taken that all regulations are followed in the construction of these buildings, else we may just see more potential death-traps going up by the month. On March 2, it was paper records that were destroyed, but it could so easily have been human lives.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 5^th, 2014.

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