5 august 2019 http://www.openthemagazine.com 7
‘T
he laTesT fire in
Mumbai...’ is how i began this
column, then stopped because by the
time this issue of Open is printed and
gets into your hands, there may well be
another fire or two in this out-of-
control city. so i will begin with: The
fire which broke out the day before i
wrote this column could have been far,
far worse if it hadn’t been for the
efficiency and bravery of the
fire brigade.
it happened during a working day
in MTNl’s 10-storey building in Bandra
when there were over 200 people
inside. Yet no one was killed or injured.
as many as 175 firefighters, 14 fire
engines, three turntable ladders and
one robot firefighter handled the blaze
and rescued people, bringing down
many from the terrace using turn-
tables. (apparently the robot, bought
with much fanfare and even more
money, didn’t do too well in its first
outing: it found passages too narrow to
turn in and couldn’t climb up the stairs
unaided. Perhaps it’s an ancient robot.)
There will, of course, be a post-
mortem to find out the whys and the
wherefores. There always is in these
cases. Pity no one has a pre-mortem
because that would stop many
incidents from becoming disasters. in
this case, they would have found fire
alarms were not functioning (but, hey,
people can shout!), smoke had filled
the staircase so people couldn’t escape
(that’s why you need open windows in
all stairs) and the building’s compound
had become a junkyard for discarded
cables (giant, pythonesque ones),
rubble and even abandoned cars. (Why
does MTNl buy disposable cars with
such abandon?) all this sounds like the
old indian saying, ‘Good housekeep-
ing is only for the house’, but in this
case, the brigade’s fire engines, tankers
and turntable ladders found very little
room to manoeuvre, thus severelyhampering operations.
another major impediment to fire-
fighting was ‘disaster tourism’: i am sure
there is no better sight than watching
a building burn, but the hordes which
turned up ended up blocking roads and
pathways and generally getting in the
way. i would think it’s always better to
watch these spectacles on TV: you have
slow-motion replays, coverage from
different angles and expert comments.
But what can top the woman stranded
on the building terrace who recorded
her moment of rescue with a selfie, and
even smiled and posed for her camera
atop the ladder?a
fTer The PosT-MorTeM
of the foot overbridge (foB)
which collapsed at the CsT station
and killed eight, the BMC lumbered
unswiftly into action and did pre-
mortems on 300 foBs across the
city. Twenty-nine were found to be
‘extremely dangerous’, requiring
‘immediate demolition’. a mere four
months later, the BMC has issued
tenders to demolish 10 of these.
There’s nothing like quick action.
one is certain the wheels of super-
swift motion are being oiled right
now for more pre-mortems after the
post-mortem of the Dongri building.
This collapsed on July 16th and killed- after all, 499 more buildings are on
the imminent-collapse list and in each
of them people live and hopefully not
die. Why don’t they move out? if you
ask that, you obviously don’t live in
Mumbai: accommodation here is dif-
ficult to find—and expensive. areas
like Dongri aren’t for the well-off, so
people in condemned buildings prop
them up with bamboo and prayer.
The commonsensical question is:
why don’t the authorities do structural
audits of cessed buildings before they
get into the danger zone? after all, the
cess tax goes into a repair fund and if
you fix structural problems when they
are small, cost of repairs will be small
too, plus you avoid people having to
move out. The trouble with common
sense, of course, is it isn’t common.
People cope with difficult
circumstances with humour; in
Mumbai we do so by inventing
phrases. ‘Disaster tourism’ is one,
‘holiday construction’ another. When
the BMC assistant municipal
commissioner in charge of Dongri was
quizzed on turning a blind eye to illegal
additions to the now-collapsed build-
ing, he said the construction happened
during holidays. apparently, builders
put up even 10 floors on a holiday.
speedy Gonzálezes, all of them.T
he 50Th aNNiVersarY of
the moon landing was
commemorated widely in our
newspapers. There was a wonderful
photograph of the three astronauts,
Neil armstrong, edwin aldrin and
Michael Collins, riding in an open
Cadillac with large crowds cheering
on both sides of the road. it is said
the crowd at their public reception
was the biggest ever at azad Maidan.
The stage for them was a same-scale
replica of the eagle lunar module in
which they had travelled. another
nice touch was provided by a Navin
Chandra Kajaria who presented the
astronauts and their wives with
tickets for the rs 3 lakh Diwali
Jackpot Maharashtra state lottery. Did
any of them strike it lucky? Perhaps
not. The moon was jackpot enough. nMuMbai Notebook
Anil Dharker