The fire at Mantralaya in Mumbai tells us a lot. While much will be talked of whys and hows, priority should be given to reconstruct lost information

I was busy writing something on the notepad on 21 June 2012 when I heard the siren of the fire engine on Babulnath Road sometime after my late lunch that afternoon and wondered where in my neighborhood the fire was. From my verandah on the ground floor with a canopy of trees, the sky is hardly visible. Whenever the fire brigade comes to our area it is generally to rescue a bird entangled in a kite string or an old branch of a tree that is precariously dangling. My curiosity arose further when I heard not one but two or three additional fire engines, couple on Pandita Ramabai Road near Wilson College and one on Babulnath Road soon thereafter with a sound of an ambulance and police sirens put in. I feared the worst. Was Mumbai experiencing another serial blasts!
 
The security men of our building apparently did not have even a tenth of my curiosity and only on my questioning, did one of them venture to go out onto the Babulnath Road to see what all the siren sounds were for. Meanwhile, as I normally do, took a break by logging in to my Facebook account and saw a posting by my TV journalist friend showing “first pictures of the fire at Mantralaya”. The black smoke of course hid Mantralaya. To confirm this I switched the TV on, given that I had heard more than three vehicles with sirens soundings. There was enough being shown… Mantralaya, the seat of power of the Government of Maharashtra was on fire… Mantralaya that proudly housed the control room of state’s Disaster Management Cell was burning.
 
I have been to Mantralaya on several occasions. I have been to the conference halls of home department as well as of the chief minister’s. I have been to secretary in charge of the Disaster Management Cell and rehabilitation (after the Killari earthquake), I have been to department of environment, I have been to secretary special projects (Mumbai), etc. Getting into the Mantralaya was not difficult as it was at the invitation of the secretaries concerned but procedures were elaborate. There were two entry points for us visitors and I wondered how during emergencies would people evacuate the building quickly at these bottlenecks? However my fears got set aside when I found that although to a visitor Mantralaya appeared complicated—essentially while looking for a particular department—overall it is a simple concept of corridors and staircases. Other than the two, I found that other staircases were actually for exiting people and entry to ministers and IAS officers. The main staircase was as good as in the open—big landings and windows and lifts.

Thus from my sense of safe design perspective, the path of escape during a fire was adequate. But what was unknown to me or not realized by me was that most of the walls separating different departments were in fact wooden partitions and not the half-brick thick wall. Any office contains lots of papers, and if they are stacked in files they get compressed and take a lot to get on fire on their own. Even wooden partitions do not catch fire just like that. In my limited but reasonably correct experience and knowledge, there has to be (i) heat source from which heat was not getting dissipated quickly and temperature was rising; or (ii) inflammable items were present in good quantity together to catch fire due to un-dissipated heat in the close proximity. I could guess this to be due to malfunctioning pantry equipment on the fourth floor where it is reported the fire seems to have commenced.

What is intriguing is that there are at least four office staff directly attached to the IAS secretary of any department and are expected to know how to be careful with heat sources and how to respond during emergencies. It is reported that fire escape drill was not carried out for a decade—this is something that I find it difficult to digest.

The fire seems to have spread from fourth floor south-west corner where there is a staircase too (assuming that the main entrance is facing south) towards south-east through central staircase and also towards north-west and then north-central. It also spread upwards to the fifth, sixth and seventh floors. Forensic study will reveal the correct picture but to me prima-facie inflammable material must be present all over the 4th ,5th ,6th and 7th floors and were not stored in safe manner.
 
The photograph shows that the main staircase lobby too was in flames and was perhaps the reason why escape from this staircase and the south-west staircase was not possible for persons on these floors. Also access to the staircase on south-east became impossible as the burning main staircase lobby came in the way. This is why people tried to get off the windows and pipes.

Questions will always be raised as to why fire on the fourth floor and response to extinguish it was so sloppy? Why was human response so slow? One must always remember that there is every possibility of the sprinkler system and smoke detection system failing at critical moments. Communication may fail at any time, but ability to survive is an animal instinct and human intelligence tries to minimize damages. While much will be talked of whys and hows, the action to take is to reconstruct lost information.

It is said that many of the papers have been scanned and electronically stored. In my opinion, the foremost task is to duplicate the electronically stored information and then after safeguarding the original electronic copy, begin taking hard copies.
The government of Maharashtra has already sent appeals to the citizens through Marathi and English newspapers, to help in rebuilding the lost data. I am sure it would obtain similar information from all municipal corporations, councils, zilla parishad and tehsil offices in the state.

A rapid assessment of structural damage by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) team comprising Prof Ravi Sinha and Prof Alok Goyal of IIT Bombay has stated that minimal damage has been caused to the original concrete columns and beams and that ground to third floor could be immediately made operational.

First things first—all occupiers of any building do not wait for fire authorities to come and tell you to keep egress paths clear of any obstruction. Also it is better to check when your instinct tells you that there could be some unexpected burning smell than waiting for someone else to find out. There is no need to panic but verify when in doubt. See that the staircase lobby has emergency lights working on rechargeable battery. Keep a bottle of water handy in case you have to leave your premises under emergency conditions.

(Sudhir Badami is a civil engineer and transportation analyst. He is on Government of Maharashtra’s Steering Committee on BRTS for Mumbai and Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority’s Technical Advisory Committee on BRTS for Mumbai. He is also member of Research & MIS Committee of Unified Mumbai Metropolitan Transport Authority. He was member of Bombay High Court appointed erstwhile Road Monitoring Committee (2006-07). While he has been an active campaigner against Noise for more than a decade, he is a strong believer in functioning democracy. He can be contacted on email at [email protected])