10K fire incidents in Delhi till June 30 this year

New Delhi: The national capital witnessed over 10,350 fire incidents in the first six months of the year claiming lives of 60 people and injuring 395 others, the Delhi Fire Service (DFS) said. According to the data accessed by PTI, the year has so far been busy for the operators at the DFS control room, who attended 16,763 calls between January 1 and June 30 this year. Of these calls, 10,379 were related to fire incidents, 1,548 calls to animal rescue, and 1,805 to bird rescue, besides the few hundred other calls that were made in cases of drowning, etc.

The year saw some major fire incidents breaking out in factories as well as at JJ clusters, the fire officials said. The maximum number of fire incidents was reported between April 1 and June 30 this year, in part contributed to by scorching temperatures and heatwave conditions during the period. Atul Garg, Director of DFS, said that between January 1 and June 30, the fire department conducted 340 fire-fighting operations in commercial enterprises, 239 in industries, and 89 in JJ clusters.

The department was faced with one of most devastating fire incidents in recent years, when in May it found itself battling a furious blaze in a factory in outer Delhi's Mundka area. At least 27 people perished in that fire, and 16 were wounded. The bodies of those killed in the fire were charred to the extent that police had to resort to DNA profiling to identify many of them. The incident was followed by another in northeast Delhi's Mustafabad area, when in a fire that broke out on May 19, a 42-year-old man was killed and six others were injured.

Garg said that many of these fires were result of sheer recklessness of the people, and sometime cutting of corners by the owners of the establishment, who kept the merchandise in a tight squeeze, with little ventilation. "We have witnessed that people have been careless especially when it comes to following fire-preventing measures in industries and other commercial places. It could happen due to dropping of lit cigarettes in the premises where machines are functioning, leading to burning of equipment.

Materials are piled up with no space for ventilation or non-servicing of equipment," he said. Mostly the cause of fire in such cases turns out to be electrical faults due to overloading, short circuits, or heating, he said.

He said most of the establishment where fires were reported were found to have no 'No Objection Certificate', or NOC, and those that did have, failed to renew them after the expiring of their three-year validity.