Thick smoke, stampede while escaping: Ordeal lasted 2 hours, recall occupants

Akbar said when he opened his door near Sumaila’s room, he saw that her bedsheet was on fire and toxic fumes were coming out of it. Said Akbar, “I got a few buckets of water and started pouring it on the mattress but there was a lot of smoke so I could not see anything… Meanwhile, the tenants and rest of my family woke up and we ran for our lives.”

Akbar said there are three exits to the building — one on the ground floor and the others on the second and fourth floors. But due to the smoke, everyone rushed downstairs which “led to a stampede-like situation”.

Nazni, Azmat’s wife, said most of them were asleep after breaking their roza the night before. She told The Indian Express: “Everything was hazy as there was thick smoke across the four floors… we were on the third floor and my husband and I tried to wake our children, Hamza and Soni, to escape… There was a ruckus as residents from all the floors were exiting through the ground floor and the stairs were narrow… Soni received some burn wounds while Azmat and I somehow escaped, but Hamza collapsed due to the smoke.”

Recalling how he couldn’t save his nephew, Akbar said Azmat and Nazni came down and told him that their son and daughter were trapped inside. “I went upstairs and saw Soni, she was partially conscious so I picked her up and brought her down… when I went up to find Hamza, he was lying face down on the stairs…”

The youngest brother of the family, Haseen, who was sleeping outside the house at the time in a makeshift tent, said the ordeal lasted two hours: “The rooms were cramped which led to the smoke quickly enveloping the premises and choking the residents… there are around nine rooms in the building and a total of 24 people live here…”

Arduous rescue op

Buckets of water arranged from a washroom in the building to five-six persons using pipes to douse the blaze before DFS fire tenders arrived — the rescue operation was an uphill task.

Akbar, who was the first responder to the incident, said he started pouring several buckets of water to save his sister-in-law and her son. “As the smoke kept billowing unabated and more water was required, I attached pipes to the building’s tanker and aimed it at the fire,” he said.

Meanwhile, a few other relatives and neighbours gathered and rushed up the building in a bid to rouse the residents and get them downstairs. Feroz, a neighbour, said: “It was becoming very difficult to breathe, we were struggling to even speak. We turned on the flashlights on our phones to spot any occupant. Some of us managed to shout out but most of the tenants had fallen unconscious or couldn’t open the door due to the haze.”

Taju Das, a tenant on the second floor, said he had a narrow escape. “I was talking to my wife on the phone and went outside because of a disturbance in the network, when I saw a thick smoke coming from downstairs… I immediately tried waking up Fazlu, who was asleep, but it was too late… I quickly jumped from the second-floor stairs,” he said.

Das said a couple, Deepali and Dinesh, had rented out one of the rooms on the second floor a few months ago and that Deepali was expecting her first child soon.