Mall's Fire-Fighting System Was Not Working

Poor ventilation, plenty of combustible material caused Link Square fire to spread

- Sabah Virani

MUMBAI: The Link Square shopping complex that went up in flames in Bandra on Tuesday was a tinder box waiting to be lit. This damning preliminary finding comes from the Mumbai Fire Brigade a day after 72 firefighters took 12 hours to contain the raging blaze and 22 hours to extinguish it.

"The fire-fighting system wasn't working, including the sprinklers," chief fire officer, Ravi Ambulgekar, told HT on Wednesday. An assistant divisional fire officer, who was at the site on Tuesday, added that the system was not working even though the shopping complex regularly submitted Form B, which shows evidence of a working system.

"It is possible it was a manual system, which would have to be operated from the basement, but that wasn't accessible. The fire alarm kept ringing till 3 pm on Tuesday," he said.

The fire is believed to have started in the basement, a large area occupied by popular electronics store Croma. It started in the wee hours on Tuesday, and escalated from a Level 1 fire to a Level 3 fire in just 40 minutes, and then to a Level 4 fire in just over two hours (Each level denotes the severity of a fire and the number of fire tenders that needs to be deployed).