DNCC market fire: ‘No prior recommendations implemented’

None of the recommendations made by the Fire Service and Civil Defence after the 2017 DNCC market fire were implemented by the market authorities, a fire service official said today.

“After the 2017 fire at the DNCC market, we made several recommendations to the market authorities regarding fire safety, however, none of those recommendations have been implemented,” said Major Shakil Newaj, director (operations and maintenance).

Major Shakil was addressing a briefing at the Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) kitchen market following a fire incident there this morning.

“The market does not even have adequate water supply to fight a blaze, despite our recommendation in this regard. We had to bring water from a distant place to douse the fire today,” Newaj also said.

CHART: Deaths in Bangladesh fire incidents 2006-2018

Data source: Bangladesh Fire Service and Civil Defence.  Chart by: Zaid Kalam

“However, since there was no crowd early in the morning and the roads were empty, we did not have to worry about crowd control and went for offensive firefighting to bring the blaze under control promptly.”

“We were informed of the incident at 5:48am and within 30 seconds our firefighters from Baridhara, Kurmitola and Tejgaon fire service stations were engaged. We deployed 20 units at a time and brought the fire under control by 8:25am and managed to douse the fire completely,” he said.

“One firefighting unit always stays back after the blaze is doused to make sure the fire is completely doused and does not recur,” Newaj added.

On January 3, 2017, a devastating fire reduced much of the DNCC market at Gulshan-1 to rubble. No one was killed or hurt in that blaze but over 300 shops were gutted and a portion of the market collapsed on impact, causing losses worth several hundred of crores of taka.