A burning issue

With the number of fires increasing in Sharjah, the Civil Defence has made several recommendations. Yet many buildings do not have adequate fire safety measures, staff are not properly trained and some apartments even have illegal constructions. Mahmood Saberi reports

• By Mahmood Saberi
• Published: 00:00 February 10, 2006
• 

With the number of fires increasing in Sharjah, the Civil Defence has made several recommendations. Yet many buildings do not have adequate fire safety measures, staff are not properly trained and some apartments even have illegal constructions. Mahmood Saberi reports

A boy set fire to his mattress playing with a lighter while his mother was in the shower. Within minutes the fire spread and thick smoke engulfed the apartment.

The choking smell of the burning mattress brought the mother running out of the bathroom. She immediately grabbed the boy and ran out of the building.

Next door, labourers who had worked on the night shift had settled down to sleep in their bunker beds, when they were woken by screams and the acrid smell of smoke.

When they opened the door to investigate, they could not see a thing as the corridor was shrouded in a blanket of smoke.

Critical

Crucial minutes had passed, and this was the time when lives could be saved or be lost, but still there was no warning, no fire alarms going off, to get the hundreds of families living in the residential tower to move out of harm's way.

Panic spread among some of the tenants on the fourth floor of the 15-storey building, as they could not escape because of the smoke. It was then that some wanted to jump down from their windows.

Neighbours shouted at them to hold on and tried to get a nearby construction crane to the window, but failed.

Firefighters arrived shortly afterward. Fortunately no tenant died. But many children and adults suffered from smoke inhalation and were seen vomiting as they were taken away in ambulances.

Tragedy again

But two months later tragedy struck in the densely populated area of Rolla in downtown Sharjah. The police operations room got an urgent call at 1am on a Friday that a building was on fire. The two-storeyed building housed some 300 people.

The entrance passage was very narrow. The building did not have an emergency exit. Shopkeepers had also stored some of their goods in the building and there was no fire fighting equipment in the building.

As the blaze spread rapidly, a man and a woman living in a makeshift shelter on the roof died in the bathroom while trying to seek shelter from the fast spreading fire. The woman was a nurse in a local hospital. The couple was newly-married.

It took more than four hours for the fire to be brought under control.

Colonel Gareeb Shabban, Director of Sharjah Civil Defence, said at that time it was against the law to store goods in a residential building. He said it is also illegal and against municipal rules to build temporary shelters on the roofs of buildings. "It is difficult to control fires in such buildings," he said.

Warned

A consultant had earlier warned that many landlords in Sharjah are not bothered about the safety aspects of their residential buildings.

An expert with the Horizon International Consultants said many older buildings do not have a fire alarm connection to the Civil Defence headquarters.

"Sometimes landlords do not pay the fees for the connection and the system is disconnected," said Mohammad Imam.

The municipality now requires that all underground garages should have a sprinkler system. The buildings should have fire hoses on each floor and high-pressure pumps and an underground water tank, especially for fighting fires.

No trash chute

Many older buildings also do not have a trash chute. The garbage is left at the doorstep for the janitor to collect. The garbage is a fire hazard, said other experts.

To compound the situation many janitors store old furniture on the premises that are highly combustible. The janitors, on the other hand, do not know how to handle fires or what to do when tenants start panicking.

Switched off

An engineer with Arenco said it is mandatory to install fire detectors in all the apartment kitchens. But since Asian cooking gives out a lot of smoke, the fire alarms keep going off all the time and are disconnected by the irritated janitors.

When Kumar moved into his apartment in Al Nahda five years ago, the fire alarm was working. But when a fire broke out in his building last year, it did not work as it had been shut off. Many tenants had to be rushed to hospital for smoke inhalation due to the lack of warning.
 
Engulfed

Early last year more than 80 workers were injured, some of them critically, when a huge night blaze engulfed a labour accommodation where they were sleeping, police said.

The fire had started in the warehouses storing chemicals, paint and wood in Industrial Area No 10, and spread to the nearby camp where more than a hundred workers were sleeping.Injured workers in hospital told Gulf News they awoke to find themselves surrounded by flames, which they had to jump through to escape with their lives.

Police said the five-hour blaze completely destroyed the three warehouses and that 81 workers in the labour accommodation were injured. Three of them were admitted to hospital with severe burns.

In March last year, a huge fire destroyed 17 warehouses and plants in Industrial Area number one. Millions of dirhams worth of merchandise was lost in the fierce blaze and firefighters had to battle it for hours before bringing it under control.

Hotspot

A major hotspot for firefighters is the huge industrial area south of the city of Sharjah. The complex was built about 30 years ago and the rules regarding fire safety were not so strict then.

The area is a dangerous mix of industries ranging from plastic recycling to paint manufacture.

Many of the small industries do not have the basic fire-fighting equipment in place or even if they do, the staff at the factories do not have the training to use the equipment.

Careful

Lieutenant Colonel Abdullah Mubarak Al Dukhani, Director General of Police Operations, said company owners should be careful to stick to safety rules.

Again just as 2005 was coming to an end, commuters on the crowded Al Ittihad Road got a front seat to watch a spectacular fire that gutted the Festival Centre. All that remains of that shopping centre is a shell, which is now guarded by security staff who keep away curious passersby.

Huge losses

An insurer earlier said that there are at least 60 big fires in the Industrial area every year. "The loss from the fires is huge," said S. P. Saxena, general manager of the Oriental Insurance Company.

While illegal power connections lead to some of the fires, according to the experts, many of them break out because of the carelessness of workers who do not know how to handle sophisticated equipment.

Many of the daily wage workers in the Industrial Area are illegally in the country and are not trained. The Industrial areas number one to seven were built about 30 years ago.

"The quality of the construction of buildings was not as good then," says Saxena. He also notes that Civil Defence regulations were also not as stringent as they are today. Here, various industries are haphazardly grouped together.

Claims

One risk manager had said that fires are a rarity in the Free Zone such as the one in Hamriya, because it is compulsory for all companies to take fire insurance.

The insurance companies advise them on what safety measures to take. "Elsewhere, the number of fires is alarming," said Saxena.

Another insurance company manager said the UAE does not have an active insurers association, which could provide guidelines to corporations and individual businessmen.

Umesh Gupta, resident manager of New India Insurance Company, said his company had paid out huge claims last year.

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