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Bengal

Mishap averted as fire broke before office time

Kolkata: Residents of the fire-ravaged building at 60, Chowringhee Road feel that the timing of the fire had contributed in averting a major disaster at the building.

The building is commercial and the three blocks in the establishment houses more than a dozen offices with a banquet hall located at a lane in the same address that leads to Bishop Lefroy Road, the residence of Satyajit Ray.

"The incident took place around 9.20 am. I was using the lift when the fire alarm inside the lift started blinking. I went to the top floor of the building where I live with my family and found that a column of smoke has started engulfing the space outside our room with the top floor of the B Block on fire. I told my family members as well as another family who lived just adjacent to our flat to come down immediately and we came down using the staircase," said Gautam Singh, who lives with his wife and three children.

"I had just switched on the air conditioner and it made a strange sound. I heard the fire alarm in the building and immediately came down. There would have been a stampede if it was after 10 am as around that time people come to office," said Shreya Das, who works at a private computer training institute located in the third floor of B Block.

It is just the floor above this institute that had caught fire, she said.

"The fire alarm was ringing. I came out of the room to find that my adjacent flat was on fire. I used the staircase and came down immediately. It was extremely difficult to breathe in that floor," said Sarala Khanna, who lived with his brother-in-law just in the adjacent apartment beside the fashion designing institute that caught fire. "We are not sure whether the things in our room are intact or not. But we are lucky to have escaped the disaster," she said.

Apart from the Khanna family, the premises owner Dipak Mukherjee has an apartment in the B Block. All other apartments are commercial.

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