CHENNAI : In September this year, Fire and Emergency Services department officials in Karnataka conducted surprise visits to several malls and high-rise commercial establishments across the state and found that at least 24 malls among the 44 that were checked violated fire safety norms. The authorities concerned were strictly instructed to clear them in the next three days.
Malls and shopping complexes are the preferred hangouts for families, filmgoers, and college students. But there is a looming concern over the preparedness of these structures to handle an emergency situation like a fire accident. Chennai has seen a spate of fire accidents, the most prominent one being the 2017 Chennai Silks fire in T Nagar. No casualties were reported. While there are strict norms in place with regard to fire safety, specialists in the field believed that often builders and developers are more keen on following the norms just to receive the building clearance. After that, maintenance and even the quality of the installed equipment was often not up to the mark.
“Fire safety in shopping complexes and malls is in quite a pathetic condition,” said V Shivaramakrishnan, member of the Fire and Security Association of India. “The basement exhaust system is not up to the mark, fire exit staircases are used to dump carton and pump rooms are filled with dustbins in many malls.
Whether the pump room has enough water to supply to the sprinklers and if the fire alarms are operational are questions we need to ask. Malls fall under the ‘mixed occupancy’ bracket which means one cannot predict how many people will turn up on a given day. Hence, it is all the more imperative to make sure all the systems are in place.”
One of the glaring problems in most malls is that every store designs the interiors as per their whim, often concealing the fire safety equipment like sprinklers, to make the store aesthetically more pleasing. Sumit Khanna, a member of Beyond Carlton, which is the only people’s initiative for fire safety, said, “We are sitting on a ticking time bomb.
Malls have high footfall, especially over the weekends, and it is worrying that most malls are ill equipped to deal with these numbers during emergencies. While many entry/exit points are sealed for security to ensure no theft or to help regulate the inflow of people, in case of an emergency these points get completely choked which can lead to a stampede. If there is a power outage, many malls rely on artificial lighting rather than natural lighting which can also spell trouble in the few minutes of panic that ensue when the fire alarm goes off.”
Emergency staircases being used to dump stuff is a gross violation of the regulations.
“The emergency staircase or fire exit is one of the most crucial elements when it comes to emergency evacuations. Many malls use these staircases as storerooms or use the doors to the exit as a place to display products. It is almost like every inch of the mall is to be monetised, but this completely defeats the purpose. Most malls convert open spaces to parking lots,” said Shivaramakrishnan.
Fire safety specialists also highlighted their concern over whether the sprinklers in many of these malls were functional. Pumprooms, they said, are being used as storerooms, at times. “Many shop owners in malls tend to overlook the fire safety process as they believe that it is operational. In order to avoid complaints regarding leakage from sprinklers in the stores, the main valve in the pumproom is shut and put on manual mode which is one of the reasons why in the time of an emergency, scrambling to put on the sprinklers is problematic as they can fail to work. The risk from a fire safety perspective is very high as many shop owners make alterations in the design to cover up the sprinklers which is a terrible idea,” said Sumit.
In 2012, a fire broke out in a mall in Qatar that killed 13 children as it spread to the kids play area and day-care centre. The alarm and sprinkler system were believed to have malfunctioned. An important observation to make is that even in India, a large number of malls have the children’s play area right next to the food court. And if a fire breaks out in one of the kitchens, it can spread in no time. In light of this, specialists said that training employees in the mall to deal with emergency situations was essential.
“I have been working here for the last three years and I haven’t undergone any kind of training to deal with an emergency,” said one of the sales employees at a store in a well-known mall. “I don’t even know where all the fire extinguishers are placed let alone how to operate them... Now that you’re asking me, I remember that there is one down the corridor but in case of an emergency, I don’t know how I will react,” he said.
CE spoke to staff members in these malls and most of them were unsure of the location of emergency staircases, sealed exits. They were also clueless about where fire extinguishers were kept and how they were to be operated. Fire safety was not a priority when it came to employment training, they said.
Architects said that at the stage of planning and design, fire safety was not a component that could be ignored.
“Fire safety is non-negotiable,” said Tahaer Zoyab, design executive director & chief collaborator at Triple O Studio. “Architects have to educate the client about the norms and to my knowledge, the norms and their implementation are followed stringently because without it, building clearances will not come through. While there may be some places where it is not up to the mark, there are others where there are routine checks to ensure the norms are being adhered to. The onus falls on the controlling agencies to ensure that fire safety systems are in place and functional.”(This is second in the Fire Safety series)
Fire as a cause for accidental death
● Major un-natural causes of accidental deaths are (i) Traffic accidents (52.8%), (ii) Drowning (8.9%), (iii) Accidental fire (5.3%), (iv) Falls (5%) and (v) Electrocution (3%).
● Maharashtra with 9.5% of country’s population has reported 15.3% of un-natural accidental deaths followed by Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu with 9.7%, 9.1% and 8.5% of such deaths respectively.
● A total of 18,450 cases of fire accidents were reported in the country during 2015 which resulted in 17,700 deaths and injured 1,193 persons.
*Source: National Crime Records Bureau