Fire guts six shacks at Arambol, no casualties

Panaji/Mapusa: Four months after the inferno at Arpora-based nightclub, Birch by Romeo Lane, where 25 people lost their lives, six private shacks at Arambol beach were gutted in a fire on Saturday.

There was no loss of life, although a few tourists and employees were present at the shacks at the time of the fire. Preliminary investigation suggests a short circuit as the cause.

Pernem MLA Jit Arolkar, who was at the spot at the time of the incident, said that there is no proper road connectivity to the shacks, which delayed fire tenders in getting to them.

A fire brigade was therefore forced to enter via the beach, but got stuck in the sand before it reached the spot. Locals, firefighters and employees of the shacks went on to douse the blaze with buckets of water, sand and fire extinguishers brought in from the neighbouring restaurants. The operation took around two hours.

The incident was reported at 2.15am on Saturday with a minor fire, but the situation worsened at around 3am when the shacks’ employees failed to control the fire. The shacks are owned by locals and some of them are rented. Of six shacks, two had shut down operations due to an LPG cylinder supply issue, while four were operational.

“Due to no proper access, the fire tender could not reach the site. We somehow managed to send one of our vehicles, but it got stranded in the sand. We managed to douse the fire with buckets of water at about 4am with the help of locals,” said fire officer Prashant Dhargalkar.

The shacks lay in such proximity to one another that some of them even touched a few houses in the locality. Mandrem police have registered the case as a fire accident.

Chief minister Pramod Sawant told TOI that he has directed the North Goa collector to conduct a detailed inquiry and submit a report to him on the incident. He said that as tourists and employees had left the shacks, there was no untoward incident reported and added that the collectors have been asked to take precautionary measures to avoid such incidents in the future.

Director of fire and emergency services, Nitin Raiker, said that the exact cause of the incident is yet to be ascertained, but a preliminary probe suggests a short circuit could have caused the fire. Raiker said the estimated loss could be around Rs 30 lakh, and that most of the shacks do not have any permission.

“Two staffers saw sparks on the electricity pole. By the time they could inform the owners, the fire spread and engulfed another two shacks,” said a shack owner, Haresh Mayekar.