Eight residents rescued after fire in GK building

New Delhi: Fire service officers rescued eight people, including three senior citizens and a child, from a blaze in the basement of a three-story residential building in south Delhi’s Greater Kailash-1 late on Saturday night. All those in the building were rescued safely, and none were hurt in the fire, which residents said may have been triggered by a short-circuit, even as the police began a probe to ascertain the precise cause of the blaze.

Residents said that the smoke spread so rapidly that only an attendant living in the basement was able to escape, while firefighters had to intervene to rescue the rest, who were trapped on balconies and the terrace.

By the end, all of them were rescued using skylifts, while firefighters had to use special breathing apparatus to enter the building, said Atul Garg, director (Delhi Fire Services).

The building, in S block of GK-1, has a basement, a stilt parking and three residential floors over a 1,200 square foot-plot.

According to Ashok Kumar Jaiswal, assistant divisional officer of the fire department, a call reporting the blaze was made around 11.15pm on Saturday.

“The basement serves as the office of an advocate who has stacked the place with a sofa set, a bed, computers and other items. An attendant who lives there had noticed the fire and had tried to douse it using an extinguisher, which wasn’t sufficient,” Jaiswal said.

DFS officers said firefighters reached the spot in 15 minutes and found residents heading to the terrace and the balconies on the upper floors, due to the smoke that had engulfed the building by that point.

“There was only one staircase in the building and since that was either burning or filled with smoke, the residents did not have any escape route,” Jaiswal said.

It then took the fire fighters about 20 minutes to use the skylift to rescue the trapped people and another two hours to douse the fire.

The lawyer, Sajal Dhamija, whose office had caught fire, said he suspected that the blaze was triggered by short-circuit. “I am still trying to understand what exactly happened. Right now, I can’t even enter the basement which is flooded,” said Dhamija, who wasn’t in the building when the blaze struck.

Police officers said they had begun an investigation to identify the cause of the blaze.

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