Crucial time lost

A fire force without a guide or a leader outside the Taj Mahal Hotel,fire tenders with ladders that did not work,hospitals without enough ambulances,operation theatres without anaesthetists,it was a familiar story all over again. And all this,despite the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation BMC,the richest civic body in the country with an annual budget of nearly Rs 20,000 crore,having a clearly defined Standard Operating Procedure SOP to deal with civic crises one that was revised and fine-tuned in the aftermath of the July 2005 deluge.

The first misstep was with the implementation of the SOP itself. The SOP puts the BMC and its commissioner,an IAS officer,in charge of a crisis and all relevant departments and officials report to the Commissioner,including the fire department and 19 BMC hospitals. But then,the 26/11 attacks didnt start as a civic crisis. And the BMC SOP hardly has anything to do with the police SOP,which,as reported in part 1 of this series,was more violated than practised.

Besides,Mumbai also has a set of major hospitals that are governed by the state administration and outside the authority of the BMC,which meant that they did not report to or co-ordinate with the civic agency and,in fact,tried to rival BMC hospitals in managing the crisis. Thus,it was not surprising that early into the bloodbath across the city,BMC Commissioner Jairaj Phatak decided that the BMC would not be the nodal agency to deal with the emergency and would report to whoever was in charge. From then on,it was a story of hits and misses.

According to records accessed by The Indian Express,the Fire Department got the first call on November 26 at 10.35 pm. The Police Control Room wanted fire tenders to reach the Oberoi-Trident hotels as grenades were being hurled inside. A team of firemen with seven fire tenders,four jumbo tankers,two aerial ladder platforms and a light van reached the location within 15 minutes. The first fire was noticed around 12.50 am when sections of the lobby below Kandahar restaurant caught fire and were doused quickly as the terrorists had moved to higher floors of the hotel.

The next call came at 1.01 am,again from the Police Control Room,asking the fire force to deploy a team at the Taj Mahal Palace and Towers Hotel which was also under siege. Half the fire team at the Trident was sent to the Taj,which is barely 10 minutes away,and another team from the Colaba fire station was ordered to join the effort. But while Police Commissioner Hassan Gafoor was himself on call outside the Oberoi-Trident to co-ordinate the response,the fire force officers found no one in charge outside the Taj.

In fact,the area around the hotel had been cordoned off and the State Reserve Police Force SRPF would not let even the firemen through. We had strict instructions from top police officials to stay 500 metres away from the Taj as the terrorists were heavily armed, Chief Fire Officer P Karguppikar,who,along with former CFO A V Sawant,was in charge of the operation at the Taj,told The Indian Express.

Added another senior fire officer,who was in the team that reached the Taj first,speaking on condition of anonymity: There was too much confusion through the night. We didnt know whom to talk to and there was no one at the spot for coordination and communication. Each authority was doing things on its own and as they saw it fit.

The Indian Express has found that the Fire Department had conducted a detailed fire audit of the hotel in 2006 and knew every access alley and rescue point. This knowledge,fire officials say,could have been utilised by the police and even the NSG,which arrived subsequently,to plan their operations to take on the terrorists who seemed to know the hotel better than the security personnel. But the Fire Department did not offer its expertise on its own,and their security counterparts did not ask.

The Mumbai Fire Department is adept at rescuing people from buildings on fire or that have collapsed,as it is such a frequent occurence during the monsoons. Even on the night of November 26,fire officers were prepared to get into the Taj and evacuate guests hiding in different parts of the hotel.

But they were allowed nowhere near the building as Mumbai Police was worried about the Lashkar men inside hurling grenades or opening fire.

However,as reported in part 2 of this series,four Lashkar gunmen were holed up in room 632 for nearly two hours from 12.38 am and this was even known to the police through the CCTV footage at the Taj security control room. Moreover,there were about 120 armed policemen on the ground floor of the hotel,who,if not storm the sixth floor of the heritage wing and take on the terrorists,could have,at least,provided cover to the fire personnel to evacuate hostages. Instead,the firemen and their equipment sat in a lane to the south of the hotel until the first big fire broke out on the sixth floor of the heritage wing at 3.05 am.

As soon as the fire started we began our operations and started dousing it, said the officer who was in the team that reached the Taj first. People inside were panicking and jumping from windows or tying bedsheets and curtains and using them to climb down. To its shock,the normally efficient Fire Department found that it had brought aluminum hanging ladders that could only reach a height of 15 metres or just below the third-floor of the hotel. Fire Department officials claim that they were not told that there were guests on the higher floors of the hotel until a woman came to a third floor window and indicated she wanted to jump out.

Aerial ladders that can reach a height of 42 metres and 50 metres were asked for and they took about 45 minutes to arrive and reach people trapped on floors three to six. But by now,the blaze on the sixth floor had become intense. And the first aerial ladder that arrived on the scene had technical problems and could not reach its maximum height. We then asked for ladders from neighbouring fire stations and it was only after 4 am that two other aerial ladders above 40-metre height could be put to use, said the fire official.

This delay is blamed for claiming the lives of the family of the Taj general manager Karambir Kang his wife and two children and the Consulting Editor of The Times of India,Sabina Sehgal Saikia,who were in rooms on the sixth floor. Kang,Fire Department officials said,personally spoke to them and pleaded with them to rescue his family. But the blaze was too strong for us to enter. By the time we doused it and entered the rooms,they were charred and it was too late, said the fire official.

While the Police Control Room may have acted with alacrity and alerted the Fire Department to reach the Trident much before fires were ignited inside,a similar presence of mind was not shown in summoning enough ambulances to the scenes of the attacks. Reason: Mumbai does not have a centralised emergency ambulance service which is recognised by the Government. The result: victims like US resident Andrena Rudrani,who was injured when the Lashkar men struck as she was having dinner at the Oberoi,had to depend on the ubiquitous black-and-yellow Premier Padmini taxis to rush them to hospital.

With four bullet injuries in her abdomen from the shooting at Café Leopold,28-year-old Anamika Gupta was the first victim to be operated upon at the St George Government Hospital. But only after a taxi ride and a long wait outside the operation theatre,as the hospital did not have an anaesthetist available. She lost 20 crucial minutes waiting before being rolled into surgery that lasted for about five hours.

Bank employee Bharat Jadhav,a resident of South Mumbai who volunteered at St George Hospital,was present when Gupta was being rushed to the operation theatre. Doctors,he recalls,told him that they didnt have enough tetanus injections,cotton,bandages,saline and anaesthetists. St George Hospital authorities said they had sent one of its two ambulances to get medicines and other supplies from any chemist in the vicinity. Around 10.30 pm,this hospital was struggling to cope with the flood of bodies from the CST Railway Station next-door. While the hospital can store only 20 bodies,50 of the 52 killed at the station had been brought there.

Around the same time,the casualty centre at the largest state-run hospital,J J Hospital,had received its first call about the attacks and doctors there set up an emergency control room and a 20-bed emergency medical service room. Eventually,most of those injured and the dead were brought here. The lack of coordination and the resulting chaos could have been avoided though,if only a proposal floated after the 2006 serial train blasts had seen the light of day.

The Government had then admitted the need for a centralised Emergency Medical System EMS with a three-tier network of ambulances and trained staff to reach places of such casualty. While Government,civic and private hospitals made their own individual effort to increase their ambulance fleets and join a private EMS service,the state Medical Education Department had only a month before 26/11 decided to draft the Emergency Medical Services Act to pave the way for an American 9/11-style emergency medical response system in Mumbai. But the Government is yet to pass the law and make way for the formation of the EMS.

If that lack of coordination was not bad enough,the state-run and BMC hospitals got into a game of one-upmanship. Initially,officials of the two divisions as well as police and other emergency departments held a meeting and fearing a high death toll from the five-star hotels under siege decided to use all state and BMC hospitals available to treat the injured and store the bodies. And then there was a change of heart and J J Hospital decided to play a central role.

Such was the determination of the state medical authorities to exercise control over the emergency that they preferred to summon forensic experts from Pune and Aurangabad to conduct the 108 autopsies at J J Hospital rather than send any bodies to BMC hospitals even though they had the necessary facilities.

The confusion and mismanagement reflected in the varying death toll figures published the next morning and the injured finding their names in the list of the dead. With no system to label patients and identify them,worried relatives spent hours locating their loved ones and the absence of a central information distribution system led to some names being published at more than one hospital.