LAHORE, Feb 24: More than 95 per cent of 14,000 multi-storey buildings in the provincial metropolis are unsafe in the event of fire due to defective designing and absence of emergency fire control arrangements.
Most of the buildings have been designed in complete disregard of principles for avoiding losses in case of fire. These buildings have single openings for entrance and exit, and no equipment has been provided for extinguishing fire.
Buildings in the Walled City and old localities like Mozang, Ichhra and Gowalmandi are unsafe because of having been raised in narrow streets where fire-brigade vehicles cannot reach in time. Nearly 200 high-rise buildings on Egerton Road, Davis Road, Gulberg's Main Boulevard and Liberty are also unsafe due to the absence of emergency exits.
The fire brigade has no vehicles with ladders to enable fire fighters to reach the upper storeys of such buildings to extinguish the fire and rescue the people stuck up there.
Multi-storey buildings have been built ignoring the safety requirements, and a number of buildings have been raised without the approval of site plans. Fire-protection precautions have been ignored in many buildings because town planning officials do not insist on amendments to the site plans for the purpose. The opinion of fire-brigade officials is also not sought during the scrutiny of site plans.
The District City Government Lahore requires at least 30 fire stations, but it has only 14 stations at the Jinnah Hall, Paniwala Talab, Queens Road, Shahdara, Timber Market, Baghbanpura, Cantonment, Bund Road, Badami Bagh, Shah Muhammad Ghaus, Shadbagh, Scheme No 2, Dharampura and Ferozepur Road with only one fire lorry each.
All lorries are very old and unreliable for rushing to the places of fire and require replacement, but the CDGL has acquired new trucks for the solid waste management instead.
One lorry is owned by the Lahore Civil Defence Organization which is more than 20 years old. The CDGL firemen do not even have gas masks or fire suits for the rescue operations.
They require the same because the owners of most of the buildings and shopping plazas do not bother to make arrangements for fighting fires despite mandatory legal provisions for doing so as the civil defence officials empowered to conduct inspections and prosecute the defaulters seldom bother to discharge their duties in this regard.
Fire-fighting equipment is also required to be kept at all factories, petrol pumps, hotels, cinemas, shopping plazas, department stores and the government offices under the law, but many of these places lack the arrangements due to the negligence of the civil defence officials.
