Drives to avert fire at Sector V buildings today

Kolkata: A massive awareness drive to prevent fire in buildings will be held in Sector V, the IT hub in Bengal, under the Nabadiganta Industrial Township Authority ( NDITA) on Friday.

Sujit Basu, minister of state for Fire and Emergency Services will be present during the awareness campaign. There will be workshops to create awareness on the issue and offices in Sector V have been requested to send their representatives.

The NDITA will request the offices to conduct fire audit and fire drill regularly. A senior official of Fire and Emergency Services said majority of the establishments were very casual about fire drill and fire audit. In few establishments in the city and suburbs, fire drills are carried out. As a result, when any incident of fire takes place it has been found that the fire extinguishers do not work, the official said.

NDITA has conducted fire audit of buildings and the flaws detected will be shown to the people who will be present at the workshop. A senior official of NDITA said it had been found that in some Sector V offices where the computers are used all through the day, there is only one air conditioner. As a result, the AC becomes hot and this can result into an electrical hazard. NDITA will request the senior officials of such establishments to increase the number of ACs to avoid any untoward incident.

New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA) has decided to conduct fire audit in all housing complexes and shopping malls in New Town. The decision has been taken following a recent incident of fire where several shops had been gutted at a commercial complex in South Kolkata.

NKDA will engage an agency which will visit the housing complexes and shopping malls to check the firefighting arrangements, condition of the fire extinguishers and whether fire drills are being carried out regularly or not.

There are many major housing complexes in New Town. There are shopping malls and offices complexes which are visited by thousands of people every day. The agency conducting the audit will go for an on the spot investigation in this regard. Senior officials of NKDA said they do not want to scare the residents, the visitors to the shopping malls or the persons attending offices, but it is absolutely necessary to maintain a proper firefighting system on these premises.