Sharjah Security and maintenance workers of Al Tayer Tower are being hailed as heroes for their selfless efforts to evacuate hundreds of residents to safety minutes after a fire ripped through the 40-storey building.
Residents and onlookers alike marvelled at news that despite the intense flames there were no fatalities, only minor injuries, from the April 28 fire.
Within the first half-hour of the blaze, before firefighters arrived, building workers bravely championed rescue efforts by climbing dark smoke-filled stairways to knock on as many doors as possible.
Burn marks
Some braved flames to clear apartments and received searing burn marks in the floor-by-floor sweep of the building.
Nasser Jamal, a resident of Flat 106 at Al Tayer Tower, said words can hardly describe the valour and bravery demonstrated by the workers amid the fiery head count of tenants.
"I've lived in this country for 30 years and never seen anything like these workers. When most people were running from the fire, they put themselves into the fire," Jamal told Gulf News Wednesday.
"They are heroes," he said.
Jamal said he did his best to assist the door-to-door campaign in the first stages of the fire and climbed the stairs up to the sixth floor alongside the workers.
"When I reached the sixth floor, I had to stop, I had no energy left," he said.
"But these men kept going floor after floor. These people deserve an award or something." Jamal said the drama unfolding as smoke wafted through the building was hard to grasp.
First-hand experience
At one point, Jamal said, he witnessed first-hand a senior security staffer named Shozem Hussain actually walk through the fire to check Flat 108.
"I saw him enter the apartment and his shirt caught fire. He put the fire out with his other hand," Jamal said. "It really was something to see."
The efforts of the workers were utterly selfless, he said. "They put their lives in danger to help others," Jamal said. "They didn't care about themselves. Really, these people have to be appreciated."
Senior security staff member Hussain told Gulf News on Wednesday that only his shirt was burned by the flames.
But he didn't remain totally unscathed by the effort.
At one point, Hussain said he had to remove his waterlogged shoes and burned his foot trying to help residents escape.
His injury was a small price to pay, he said, as he and his colleagues entered stairwells which were heavily choked with smoke. There was no emergency lighting, he said, and they had no emergency equipment to assist them.
"We had no gloves, no tissues, nothing for our face. There was lots of smoke. The smoke was full inside the staircase," he said.
"But it was necessary to bring them down as soon as possible. We had to do something extra as a team. We had to help until government services could take action."
Tough task
Getting residents to respond to their door-to-door visits was not easy.
"It was difficult, people were sleeping and there were old men and women who needed our help," he said.
Hamed Zaman Mohammad, security supervisor at Al Tayer Tower, helped lead the charge into the burning building as flaming cladding tiles fell from the exterior onto the streets below.
Black bitumen exterior wall sealant was also dripping in the form of large boiling splatters on lower balconies and lower portions of the building.
Mohammad said that he and his security and maintenance colleagues knew that time was of the essence; reaching as many people as possible within minutes was key to ensuring everyone was alerted about the fire.
As each flat and floor was cleared, shaken residents stumbled through the darkness with some descending more than three dozen sets of stairs with little or no visibility.
"We went one by one to each door," Mohammad said. "We rescued everybody and we didn't have any accidents."
He said that notifying thousands of residents was physically gruelling because workers had to climb each storey given that the elevators were out of commission.
"We feel good that everybody was safe," he said. "This is our job."
List of honour: Naming the brave men
Tower resident Nasser Jamal said he was so impressed with the heroic efforts of Al Tayer Tower workers that he compiled a list of those who helped rescue tenants.
Here is the list as provided to Gulf News.
- Hamed Zaman Mohammad (Security Supervisor)
- Shozem Hussain (Senior Security)
- Salem Ahmad (Security)
- Lawrence Dias (AC Technician)
- Mustafa Ahmad (Electrician)
- Rohoul Ameen (Cleaner)
- Hassan Ali (Cleaner)
- Munir (Cleaner)
- Mohammad Halal Al Deen (Cleaner)
- Abu Bakar (Cleaner)
