Kolkata: At least 90 people, including four hospital staff members were killed after an early morning fire on Friday gutted the AMRI Hospital located in the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Authorities have launched an investigation into the incident.
"In all, 90 bodies have been extricated from the hospital. 88 of these bodies have been identified and handed over to the relatives," Damayanti Sen, joint commissioner of police, told media on Saturday. The death toll was earlier reported at 89.
Sen, who is heading the team appointed to investigate the tragedy, added that all the deaths were due to the inhalation of toxic fumes which filled the wards in the middle of the night.
Officials also said that fleeing medical staff abandoned patients as black smoke poured through the seven-storey hospital.
The hospital's licence was immediately cancelled and its directors, including industrialists S.K. Todi and R.S. Goenka and four others, were arrested.
"It was horrifying that the hospital authorities did not make any effort to rescue trapped patients," said Subrata Mukherjee, West Bengal state minister for public health engineering. "Senior hospital authorities ran away after the fire broke out."
Senior fire brigade officials also said the multi-storey building's fire safety system was in shambles. Fire alarms were not working and the sprinklers were dysfunctional.
Initial investigations suggested the blaze had started in the basement, and most of the victims were patients who suffocated on the thick, acrid smoke that quickly filled the wards on the floors above.
Two nurses from Kottayam in the south Indian state of Kerala stayed back while their colleagues fled the facility, trying to save patients, a hospital source said. They rescued eight of the nine patients in their ward, but died while trying to save the last one.
Dwellers of a nearby slum who first noticed the smoke and fire rushed to the AMRI Hospital to raise the alarm, but security guards kept them back, saying it was only a small blaze, witnesses said.
It took firefighters in the city formerly known as Kolkata more than an hour to respond, said Pradeep Sarkar, a witness whose uncle was hospitalised but was among those safely evacuated from the private facility. Some of the slum dwellers helped with the rescue.
The neighbourhood's narrow streets apparently made it difficult for fire trucks to get close to the building and to bring in big hydraulic ladders.
Eventually, they smashed through a main gate to make way for the ladders.
It was the second fire in three years at the same facility and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who visited the site, promised a full investigation.
The West Bengal government has asked the National Disaster and Security team (NDS) and officers of the Saha Nuclear Physics facility to inspect the site over fears of a radiation leak from the radiology department situated on the ground floor. "We have sealed all the machines," the leader of the NDS team said.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed shock over the incident and offered compensation of Rs200,000 (Dh14,114.50) to the family members of each of the victims and Rs50,000 to the injured.
With input from agencies
