LAHORE, May 18: The Lahore Development Authority (LDA) administration has finally decided to demolish five damaged floors of its plaza after the engineering experts recommended it to do so keeping in view the reports of three major building stability tests (BSTs), it is learnt.

According to a senior LDA official, the city’s top civic body has no option but to demolish the plaza’s five floors (5 to 9), which were badly damaged due to massive fire around 10 days ago.

“Initially we have got conducted three major BSTs including core cutting test, compressed stamp test and yield testing by involving top engineering experts. The BSTs reports are negative, necessitating demolition of the building’s five floors,” LDA’s urban development wing’s chief Israr Saeed told Dawn on Saturday.

“Keeping in view a go-ahead from the authorities, we will start executing the task by demolishing the building’s 9th floor first from Tuesday,” he said.

Saeed said though there were some other BSTs that were scheduled to be conducted within a couple of days, the aforementioned tests were sufficient to reach a decision to demolish the affected floors. He said the building looked to be repairable after extinguishing the fire, but the LDA decided to get the BSTs conducted through experts by considering the fire intensity that caused dangerous cracks at the 9th floor’s structure.

Meanwhile, the LDA officials concerned on Saturday started removing articles such as towers and generators from rooftop, burnt material/furniture etc from the damaged floors and the entire articles from various bank branches and offices at the plaza’s ground floor. “We have assigned the building clearance task to a team that has started removing goods from the damaged floors and rooftop of the building through a 200-foot high crane,” he said.

Asked as to why the LDA didn’t use such a heavy crane to extinguish fire and save lives, the official said since the operation was being carried out by Rescue 1122, the LDA high-ups didn’t intervene in the matter. “Though the rescuers could have brought this crane, they didn’t do it.”

He said since the LDA senior officials were of the view that the rescue officials would extinguish the fire because of availability of necessary equipment, they were surprised after the rescue staff failed to do so. “Had the rescue team asked us to arrange such a heavy crane, we would have accomplished this task to save lives of people. But they didn’t tell us and kept us in the dark.”