Mockery of Fire Drill

We have heard all this before - that life is cheap in India, disaster management is not at all a priority for our society. And Bangalore is no exception to all this. Two years back the Carlton fire tragedy exposed how safety measures were sacrificed by the builder at the altar of greed, and how officials winked and signed all the dotted lines - again for a price. It was often said that we as a nation are least bothered about safety measures.

Look at Japan, we were told, how well they cope with disasters. They conduct regular drills and that is why they are able to do all that. When Carlton became a national TV spectacle, with people jumping off from the building in panic, the need for fire drills gained currency.

But what happened on February 24, 2012, almost exactly two years after the Carlton tragedy (it happened on February 23, 2010) reveals that we are ill-equipped even to carry out such drills, leave alone dealing with the actual tragedy. Maybe the organisers need to go on 'phoren' tour to learn all this.

A fire drill at a readymade garment factory in the Yeshwanthpur industrial suburbs went haywire causing the death of a woman employee. As per the drill, the employees were asked to use a rope to climb down from the fourth storey. She was the second person to do so and in the midway the rope snapped and the rest was history.

Several disturbing questions come to my mind. Firstly was it necessary that the employees had to risk their lives by climbing down from fourth floor and that too without a safety net. Forget snapping of rope, what about people with dizziness and fear of heights, won't they panic? Couldn't they have used a dummy to demonstrate it.

Climbing down a rope is no joke. Military personnel practice for months to master it. Maybe, they thought garment factory workers were Supermen and Spiderman by default!

There are also reports that the rope used was an old one and of poor quality. Not only that some had raised objections regarding the rope, but the fire department officials chose to ignore it. Anyhow now no amount of debating or inquiries would bring any solace to the woman's near and dear ones.

In my previous office we used to have fire drills carried out by one private agency, but we never had to do such risky stunts. In fact, it was the other extreme, they used to be hilarious affairs. A Colonel Blimp type guy used to take centre stage and, quite literally, bark on the microphone and some of his assistants and office volunteers (ostensibly named Emergency Response Team) used to do a demo on how to carry out rescue act.

He used to pick up volunteers for 'fire victims' randomly from the audience and used to address each one of them with film star names. "Hey Madhuri Dixit, come here?" or "hey Salman Khan don't hide behind the red shirt guy, come to the stage?"

I still recall him telling one woman 'victim' volunteer, "Don't think 'oh I am a woman, how can these men hold me'." and turning to the volunteers he said, "You should promise that you would see her as your sister and nothing else." It used to be quite tough to keep a straight face. 

And 'backbenchers' like me used to slip off to the nearest food court in our office campus. In fact these drills used to 'fire up' sales at the food court and bunk shops located outside the campus. That of course shows the other very typical Indian mindset - "Nothing will happen to me".

Also Read: Random Jottings