Tales of survivors, rescuers underline serious safety flaws

Abdus Sabur Khan, an employee of EUR Service (BD) Limited, learnt the truth the hard way during Banani Faruk Rupayan Tower fire. The building neither had any fire alarm, nor did the employees who worked there ever receive any training in fire safety. 
Fire had already engulfed the three floors below Sabur’s office on the 11th floor when he became aware of it. 
Sabur, an employee of EUR Service (BD) Limited, a freight forwarding agency, was engrossed in office work since nobody alerted him that a fire had broken out in the 23-storey office tower on the Kamal Ataturk Avenue at Banani in the city on Thursday afternoon. 
‘There was no fire alarm in the high-rise,’ said injured Sabur now under treatment at Dhaka Medical College Hospital burn unit on Friday.
During the fire, Sabur soon found out that about two dozen of his colleagues were also trapped in the fire. It was around 1:30pm, half an hour after the fire had started, reportedly on the 8th floor.
They all ran towards the exit only to find out that a huge cloud of smoke was billowing from the floors below and it had already covered the staircase and the temperature was rising fast.
‘We could not see anything,’ said Sabur, who immediately called his wife Rabeya Oni to pray for him.
The entire group, none having had the opportunity to go through any kind of fire safety training, immediately became engaged in an argument over what to do next.
Young employees were quick to make the move — they decided to run upstairs through the smoke.
Senior employees argued against it and decided to stay back until help arrived as temperature was rising fast and smoke engulfed the 11th floor.
Abdullah Al Faruqoe, assistant manager at EUR service, decided to run upstairs, said Sabur who is undergoing treatment at Dhaka Medical College and Hospital’s burn and plastic surgery unit for inhalation injury.
On that fateful day, Sabur was yet to become aware that Faroque did not make it to the roof and was burnt to death on the stairs.
On the 11th floor there were several fire extinguishers of which Sabur and his colleagues did not find any use.
‘We were totally engulfed in smoke,’ said Sabur.
Sabur and his colleagues got hold of some clothes and soaked them in water to keep their faces wet which helped them keep breathing.
After a while, when it seemed that they were inching towards death anyway, it dawned on Sabur and few others that the fire extinguishers could come in handy to break the windowpanes. 
Once that was accomplished, Sabur immediately realised that after they bore holes into the windows smoke trapped inside the building found an outlet, it started to flow out of the newly made openings. 
‘It felt like burning in hell, smothered by blowing fiery wind,’ he said.
At this point, Sabur and his colleagues found no other options but to lay down on the floor to keep them wet as much as possible in the water that poured into the building as the fire fighters outside were trying to hose down the floors to bring the fire under control.
Later around 4:15pm, fire fighters reached the 11the floor using the crane and rescued Sabur and others.
Sitting beside Sabur, Rabeya could not thank God enough for getting back her husband alive, who escaped death and has sustained only minor injuries. 
But she had a request to the government: ‘Please make fire alarm mandatory at every building,’ she said, adding that ‘many people would not have died had they known immediately that there was a fire.’
One of Sabur’s colleagues Tauqir Islam was also being treated in the same room at the burn unit along with two other survivors.
Tauqir was still in a shock and could not remember much about the fire except for that he kept calling relatives over phone to save his life.
In another bed at a corner of the room Sabbir Ali Mridha, a civilian rescuer, was lying prostrate with his feet completely bandaged.
Broken glasses wounded the his feet as Sabbir rescued a woman from the 5th floor and pulled a dead body out of the 21st floor and carried it down via the adjacent building. 
The woman Sabbir rescued was trapped alone in a room and was in a state of daze. He reached her by scaling the window grills of the building. 
He found the dead body just a floor below the roof.
‘The man was so close to escape his death,’ Sabbir lemented.
Mohammad Khaled Hasan, a junior executive at Mika Securities, was lucky enough to learn about the fire within 15 minutes after it broke out. He was on the 15th floor.
He could run to the 20th floor and use the pocket gate, which connected the ill-fated FR Tower to the adjacent building, to run to safety. 
Only after coming out did he realise that his colleague Anzir Siddique Abir was not with him.
The body of Anzir was later found on the stairs of 10th floor.
‘It seems he panicked and ran in the wrong direction,’ said Khaled.
‘It was very easy to make mistake in such an emergency. Especially people who have no idea about how to behave when fire breaks out are most likely to make mistakes,’ he said.
Fire Service and Civil Defence assistant director Saleh Uddin said that he found five bodies huddled together on the stairs. 
‘It seems the victims did not know where they were running and the floors were not marked,’ he said.
Part of the emergency staircase, which was no more than 2.5 feet in width, was rented out by the building owner where tenants had built offices.
‘It cannot be called fire escape anyway,’ he said.
The devastating fire left at least 88 injured. Conditions of two of them are stated to be critical. Those admitted with minor injuries already started showing signs of psychological trauma.
Chief national coordinator for plastic surgery and burn projects Samanta Lal Sen said that most of the injured would be physically fit to go back home but their mental recovery would take long.
It is not for the first time that authorities came to realise that buildings seriously lacked fire safety measures.
In 2006, at least 40 bodies of readymade garment workers was found piled up just beside the exit after a devastating fire had burnt down KTS Textiles and Garments in Chittagong. 
The fire had killed 54 workers. There was no fire exit in the building and its only exit was locked from outside.
 

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net