Karol Bagh hotel blaze kills 17
Wedding party members among victims, 3 jump from roof to escape, one survives
NEWDELHI: A fire suspected to have been triggered by an electrical short circuit engulfed a budget hotel in New Delhi’s dense Karol Bagh neighbourhood on Tuesday, killing at least 17 people, including two who tried to escape from the blaze by jumping off the five-storey building, the police said. Three people were injured, including a woman from Myanmar who too jumped to escape the fire.
The fire department, which received a call for help at 4.35am, said the fire had broken out an hour earlier and the delay in alerting the authorities led to the large number of deaths. Another delay took place when the firefighting unit that first responded to the alert carried a manual ladder, which was not long enough to reach the top floor of the hotel, an official said. A hydraulic skylift was later used to rescue the trapped guests and staff.
Sixteen guests and the chef died. Three of those killed in the fire at the hotel, Arpit Palace, were members of a family from Kerala that was in Delhi to attend a wedding. Delhi home minister Satyendar Jain, who visited the site, said most deaths were the result of suffocation.
Dozens of guests and hotel staffers were trapped inside the building once the blaze began, even as at least three of them – an Indian Revenue Service officer, the Myanmar tourist and the chef – jumped from the top floor and the roof of the building. Only the tourist survived, the police said.
Of the 17 fatalities, two died of severe burns and the rest of asphyxiation, said Atul Garg, chief fire officer, Delhi Fire Services.
Although the building had a no-objection certificate (NOC) from the Delhi Fire Services, safety norms were violated after the document was issued, Garg said. “When we inspected the hotel in December 2017, the roof was sealed to obtain the NOC. Later, they demolished the wall and began operating a restaurant from the rooftop,” he said.
While the fire department and a few staff members of the hotel said that a kitchen-cum-restaurant was operating from the rooftop, North Municipal Corporation of Delhi officials denied it. Photographs of the burnt roof, covered by a fibre sheet, showed tables, benches and chairs laid out.
By the time we reached the hotel, the fire had already intensified. People were trapped inside and some were already dead. ATUL GARG, chief fire officer
› Some managed to open the top floor windows. Two jumped. One jumped from the roof. We urged them not to jump but they panicked RAJENDER SINGH, local resident
alerting inflammable the A ‘significant fire material department, delay’ used in in the building, systems of ‘complicated’ the windows locking and the staff’s inability to fight the flames resulted in a large number of casualties in the blaze at Hotel Arpit Palace in Karol Bagh, the Delhi Fire Services said.
Atul Garg, chief fire officer (Delhi Fire Services), said by the time the hotel staff called for help, it was “already very late”. “The fire broke out between 3 and 3.30 am. For a long time, no one got to know of the blaze. When the hotel staffers finally woke up, they took the matter into their own hands instead of alerting us,” Garg said.
“By the time we reached the spot, the fire had intensified. People were trapped inside and some were already dead,” said Garg.
Such was the intensity of the blaze by the time the fire department arrived that a firefighter, Subhash Arya, fell unconscious after inhaling smoke and received superficial skin burns on his hand as he entered the building.
The fire department lost time as they had to take a “longer route” to reach the hotel from the Prasad Nagar fire station, just less than two kilometres away. “Several cuts in the divider on Pusa Road were recently sealed because of which the firefighters had to take a longer route,” said Balan Mani, a local resident.
Garg said it led to a delay of three-four minutes, “but made a lot of difference between life and death”.
Among the fire tenders was a “manually operated” skylift and readying it took another threefour minutes, Garg said. It wasn’t high enough to reach the upper floors, rendering it ineffective in rescuing many victims. By the time another skylift joined the operations, people were already jumping off the building.
Sunil Chaudhary, deputy chief fire officer, said the presence of wooden panels in the walls and the floor of the corridors fuelled the fire and led to dense smoke.
“The rooms did not really suffer much damage. It was mainly the corridors and the stairs
› because of which the passage was blocked,” said Chaudhary. dense themselves “But were because Chaudhary Many the Smoke smoke falling of rooms survivors the said. inside forced seeped heat had unconscious and them the no in. said smoke,” ventilation. rooms. Guests to lock the had from Since kept inside. it the is winter, The windows real the problem locked guests began them. “The when latches they tried are complicated. to open They need to be pressed inward for the window to open. But the panicked guests weren’t aware of the system and found themselves trapped inside,” said Chaudhary. The fire broke out on the first floor but spread to the upper floors of the hotel that has a residential building on one side and another hotel at its rear. Many guests chose to run upstairs in the hope of finding an exit but found themselves trapped between the burning corridors and the blazing fibre sheet over the rooftop terrace. “Some people managed to open the top floor windows. Two of them jumped. One man jumped from the rooftop. We urged them not to jump but they had panicked,” said Rajender Singh, a local resident. Two men landed on the ground and died instantly. One woman from Myanmar landed on the plastic shade of a shop on the ground floor. “That served as a cushion but left her with an injured spine,” said Singh. Atul Garg said the hotel employees tried to use the in-house firefighting equipment but had failed. “Either the staffers were not trained to use the equipment or they were nonfunctional,” Garg said. The authorities said the stairs were not wide enough to allow more than two people from running out together. “That led to a stampede and people fell on each other. There were no lights inside the building, which made it more difficult,” said Dileep Trivedi, a guest from Gujarat who jumped out of the first floor window. There was an emergency exit but it did not help anyone as the guests said they were unaware about its presence or location. Police said it was blocked with stored goods. “Forget the emergency exit, there was no security guard or hotel staff to help us in those moments,” said While a chef was among those killed, Chaudhary alleged most of the staffers escaped instead of helping the guests.