It was around 4 pm on October 29, 2009, when the people living near the Indian Oil Depot in Jaipur discovered something was seriously amiss. The air was laden with the smell of petrol, and the concentration seemed to be increasing as the minutes passed. People were getting edgy and started leaving the area. Meanwhile the staff at the Sitapura Oil Depot struggled to contain the leak from a pipeline that transported the highly inflammable oil. By 6.30 pm, the local authorities were informed and the fire brigade arrived at the area, but were all at sea on how to contain the situation. At around 7.30 pm, there was a huge blast at one of the tanks, and the fire started raging. The fire blazed on for more than a week and resulted in 12 deaths and injuring over 200 people. Around half a million people were evacuated from the area during this period. The fire was a major disaster in terms of deaths, injury and loss of business, property and man-days, displacement of people, environmental impact in Jaipur. The Indian oil corporation faced a total loss of about Rs. 300 crore along with a number of dead and injured employees.
This incident is not an islolated one. The Uphaar Cinema fire of 1997 that killed 59 people remains one of India’s worst fire tragedies. More recent ones include the Carlton Towers fire in 2010 in Bengaluru and the Powai highrise fire of 2015 in Mumbai.
Such incidents highlight the loopholes in the fire safety mechanism of urban structures. There are several factories, industries, offices that flout the fire safety norms set by the government. Fire safety awareness is a crucial factor in avoiding fire-related incidents, and businesses, workers and visitors to their facilities need to equip themselves with basic safety knowledge, as well as ensure that the systems protecting them are appropriately designed for the risk they are protecting against.
Fire safety does more than just protecting the workforce of the organization. Fires often render the assets of an organization unusable if damage is significant to the business. They also have an ill effect on the company’s capital since they must now spend money to restore assets rather than advance business operations. If the disaster results in rendering the location unusable then the corporation may have to relocate in place of operations along with sparing expenses in the reconstruction of the damaged location. A major fire would cost an enterprise its time, which it now has to use to focus on the aftermath of the fire rather than regular business operations. According to a study 80% of businesses that are affected by a major fire incident shut down within 18 months. To avoid catastrophic situations due to a fire, employers need to have appropriate fire alarm systems, and also conduct regular training for employees and have appropriate signage in place for visitors.
Fire protection within a structure is a system that relies on all of its components. The building is designed in compliance with the local building and fire safety norms set by the authorities.
Automatic fire protection measures are automatically functioning apparatus that warn the occupants about a fire and extinguish or control a fire in a structure. These are designed to control a fire at the earliest stage without any loss of life and property. The advantages of this system have been identified universally and accepted by government and insurance authorities. Insurance companies find significant reduction in losses when automatic suppression systems are instated.
Manual measures incorporate items such as fire extinguishers, fire hydrants, hose stations, etc that require participation from the staff or the fire department to control and extinguish a fire.
In fact, there are many automated systems that can be deployed at offices and manufacturing plants to avoid any major disaster. For instance, UTC’s fire detection and suppression technologies protect a range of premises—including homes, hotels, data centers, shopping centers, offices, oil rigs and more. It offers a wide range of solutions for fire detection and suppression with installation, inspection, monitoring and response solutions for customers worldwide in a variety of application and settings.
Many organisations live under the mistaken belief that taking out an insurance against a fire incident is the best protection. But insurance can only make up for the physical and material loss; it cannot replace the damage to life, or the brand. For instance the fire at Indian Oil brought into focus the danger of having storage tanks in the vicinity of living areas in the city, resulting in an overhaul of shifting the tanks to the outskirts. There is a much bigger loss at play, much more than can be accounted in money.
Date: August 20, 2015