Disaster Due To Carelessness

Karol Bagh hotel blaze kills 17 as rules flouted openly.

- Sanjeev Sirohi

No words can be adequate to condemn most strongly the complete and callous flouting of rules by hotels with impunity which is squarely and solely responsible for such hotel blaze as we saw just recently in Hotel Arpit Palace in Karol Bagh which ultimately resulted in the killing of 17 people for no fault of theirs! Their only fault was that they trusted the big name of the hotel in New Delhi’s Karol Bagh and paid for it with their invaluable lives! Time and again we see such innumerable incidents happening yet everything is soon forgotten only for another incident to revive those unpalatable memories again with a more bad taste perhaps in many such cases!

Needless to say, the permanent and painful loss suffered by the near and dear ones of those killed is beyond words to describe and is irrepairable! No money announced as compensation can ever be enough to compensate the lives of those who have died! But both Centre and State Government feel proud to announce quick compensation but do nothing to frame strictest rules to ensure that no one dare again violate safety norms in hotels and lodging homes!

To be sure, a fire is suspected to have been triggered by an electrical short circuit that engulfed a hotel named Arpit Palace that killed at least 17 people including an IRS officer and the chef who tried to escape from the blaze by jumping off the five-storey building. A woman from Myanmar were among the many who were injured while jumping to escape the fire. A hydraulic skylift was later used to rescue the trapped guests and staff.

No doubt, the casualty figure went up as people were asleep when the fire broke out! What further compounded the tragedy was that as people got up after hearing noise and went down they found the door to be locked and they could not find any safe passage to go out! There were 53 people in the 45-room hotel which had a canopy on the terrace housing what appeared to be a restaurant.