Editorial
Inferno at Islambagh
Lessons learnt are never applied
THE dreadful daytime blaze at Islambagh on Thursday took a heavy toll in terms of lives lost, people injured and suffering and property gutted. The loss is calculated at anything between Tk two and four crore. Not only poor people are having to live under open skies, the loss of shoe and foam factories has dealt a blow to local trade.
Even though the exact cause of fire was not immediately known, the most plausible seems to be sparks originating in a welding shop near the shoe sole factory that ignited a bush fire like hellfire in an area stuffed with inflammable materials. As the drums containing chemicals caught fire and blew up so did an electric transformer with the fire being fuelled into a virtual inferno.
As with previous fire incidents, this time too, the fire service personnel had great difficulty controlling the blaze and putting it out, which altogether took three hours. With narrow or no access through the maze of alleys and blind alleys together with no water source nearby to be able douse the fire, the 17 fire service units commandeered from different fire stations had to literally struggle against daunting odds to be able to reduce the fire into dying embers.
This weaves like an all-too-familiar tragic tale of a fire breaking out from either an electric short circuit, or an exposed cooking stove, or a leaking gas line, or sparks from welding machine and then the hindrances faced by the fire service in getting to the area promptly enough to bring the fire under control. Other than a recital of problems what have we done to mitigate the situation through an action plan for fighting fire given all the constraints there are. We have quickly unlearned the lessons after each fire only to encounter a more ferocious fire the next time around.
Let's face itwe cannot change the demographic realities overnight nor can we arrest the horizontal expansion of habitat. What we can do is keep the populous spots free from strings of factories or welding shops. If the latter should be unavoidable in some cases, then at least their owners must be required to have fire extinguishers in their premises. Sometimes, acts of sabotage were suspected in the case of some slum fires on the part of a rival group. This calls for intense policing and vigil on the part of communities. But basically, an awareness of fire hazards and how to minimise these, will have to be built among the citizens.
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