A 45-year-old woman died after a fire broke out a six-storey commercial building in Santacruz area of the western suburbs on Thursday. The deceased, identified as Tara Chiman Waghela, was a sanitation worker who got stuck in the washroom of one of the commercial units in the building.
According to the Mumbai Fire Brigade, the blaze broke out in the basement parking lot of Dheeraj Heritage, a 20-year-old building with 395 commercial units, including shops, offices and banks.
Ravindra Ambulgekar, MFB chief fire officer, said that the fire could have originated following the leakage of petrol from the tanks of one of the parked vehicles. “The tanks of one of the parked vehicles leaked and the spilled petroleum might have resulted in a blaze, which spread very fast due to asbestos sheets through electrical wiring and ducts,” Ambulgekar told The Indian Express.
He said that even though there was an in-built fire fighting system in the basement, people could not reach the hose pipes as smoke engulfed the entire floor. “There were sprinklers in place, but we are yet to ascertain if the system was fully operational or not,” he said.
Aftab Siddique, who has two offices in the first floor of the building, said that the deceased Waghela was employed in a private bank located on the first floor of the building. She said that her office wasn’t affected as it was towards the main entrance facing the north, while the blaze broke out in the eastern side.
“After the fire broke out, everybody started runing out of the building but the woman (Waghela) got trapped inside the washroom, which got locked. She kept banging the door from inside but nobody could reach out to her. Later, when she was rescued, we saw her bleeding from nose due to suffocation and within moments she died,” Siddique told The Indian Express.
Adding that the key to the terrace wasn’t available to the occupants, Siddique said, “Had the blaze erupted from any of the floors above, there would have been more casualties, as the keys to the terrace were not handed over to us by the builder… for 16 years we have been fighting this issue in the courts.”
The incident was reported at 5 pm and the blaze was declared level 2 around 5.30 pm, after which seven fire engines and five jumbo water tankers were deployed.
The Santacruz fire was the third fire incident reported in Mumbai within 24 hours. On January 24, two different fire incidents were reported at a residential building and a scrapyard in Goregaon area of western suburbs. While no loss of lives were reported in these incidents, one person sustained minor burns.