What started as a minor blaze inside a virtual tinderbox of a hotel — operating without even basic firefighting provisions — quickly escalated into one of the worst fire tragedies in Kolkata in recent memory, claiming the lives of at least 14 people, including a woman and two children.None of the victims, though, was charred by the flames.
While Manoj Paswan, an employee of the hotel, succumbed to his injuries following his attempt to escape the blaze by jumping off the second-floor cornice, the remaining 13 bodies, recovered later from the site, showed signs of death by asphyxiation, police said.
Multiple bodies were found at the narrow staircase on the second and third floors of the hotel, and the rest were discovered inside the guest rooms locked from inside, officials confirmed.
The incident triggered tragic memories of the March 2010 Stephen Court fire on Park Street, which left 43 dead, and the December 2011 AMRI Hospital blaze that claimed over 90 lives.
Burrabazar, the city’s thickly populated wholesale trading hub, has been witness to numerous major fire incidents in recent times owing to its old, unplanned and illegal constructions sporting gross violations of fire safety norms.
A fire at the Surjya Sen Street market, not far from the current accident site, killed at least 19 people, mostly labourers, in 2013.
In June 2020, a devastating fire at the neighbourhood Bagree Market destroyed the 150-year-old building.
The low-cost six-storey Rituraj Hotel in Mechhua Falpatti area of Burrabazar in central Kolkata, housing 50 guest rooms, flouted every possible fire safety norm in the book since it came up 25 years ago, firefighting officials said.
According to police, the hotel was hosting 88 guests in its 42 occupied rooms when fire broke out at one of the east-side rooms on the hotel’s first floor around 7.30 pm on Tuesday.
While the firefighters managed to contain the flames from spreading to the upper floors, thick black fumes of gases quickly engulfed the building, converting the premises into a virtual gas chamber.
“It is evident that some of the victims were trying to escape the flames by trying to run out of the building, but were choked because there were no alternative escape routes other than that one staircase. Others were hoping to save themselves by locking them up in their respective rooms until the smoke suffocated them to death,” Bipin Ganatra, a voluntary firefighter and Padmashri Awardee, who rushed to the hotel to douse the flames and assist officials in their rescue operations, said.