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| Srinagar needs immediate fire audit | | |
early times report
Srinagar, June 27: The mysterious fire that destroyed the historic shrine of Pir Dastgir Sahib on Monday has thrown up serious questions about the safety of not only our heritage buildings, but has also exposed the extreme vulnerability of the entire city.
Where were the fire hydrants those have been installed in Khanyar locality like everywhere else in the city to ensure timely, uninterrupted and adequate water supply to fire tenders during a fire emergency? Eye-witnesses have seen the fire tenders deployed to douse the flames of the blazing shrine fill their tanks from the nearby Brarinambal water body.
In fact, the attack on three fire tenders by an angry mob happened when the mob objected to the use of dirty and stinking water to douse the flames of a sacred place like the shrine of Pir Dastgir Sahib. Why did the fire tenders have to go and fill their tanks from the Brarinambal water body if hydrants have been installed at every place in the city?
The fact that the fire tenders could not make use of the hydrants around the shrine when they needed to fill their depleted tanks proves that these fire hydrants are either buried under tons of macadam laid on the road outside the shrine or have been gobbled up by the shopkeepers as they encroached on the free space outside their shops.
This disturbing reality has exposed the safety of not only our heritage buildings in the city but of the entire city as well. The downtown areas of the city like any other such area in the World are heavily congested. Houses are laid one near the other without any fire gap or urban specifications required for building housing colonies and urban settlements.
A fire audit is already overdue in Srinagar city while the same must begin by trying to establish what happened to the fire hydrants installed outside the Pir Dastgir Sahib shrine on the fateful day. The same fire audit must look into the reported absence of the fire tender from the shrine complex where it is supposed to have been on round the clock duties.
The fire hydrants are high pressure constant flow water supply points installed by the PHE department to facilitate the refilling of fire tender tanks during fire emergencies. These fire hydrants always remain filled with water under high pressure since these are always capped and inaccessible unless decapped during a fire emergency.
Why has not the PHE department been undertaking regular and timely inspections of its fire hydrant points in the city? If these had been encroached upon during road widening or illegal encroachments by greedy businessmen then why hadn't the new hydrant points been laid in those areas?
It has become usual for the state government to raise the pitch of accountability during a crisis and then conveniently forget the same after the crisis passes over. The destruction of a historic shrine whose love and respect cut across religious lines in the state could have been avoided if the fire audit of the shrine and also the entire city had been done in time. Those who slept over such a crucial issue also need to be punished. If we wait for the crisis to settle down without learning any lessons from it then we could be in for more national tragedies like the one we witnessed on Monday.
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