Witness To Horror, Heroism & Despair

Indore: Around 3 am on Saturday, residents of

Swarn Bagh

colony woke up to screams of agony and despair. Rushing out of their houses, they were met with a sight that would probably haunt them for longA three-storey building in the neighbourhood was burning like a fireball with dense smoke, fire, and heat emerging from its only entry/exit point on the ground floor.Before they could fathom what was happening, a youngster jumped from the building screaming, asking people to save his friend, who had fallen unconscious because of fire on the second floor. A resident of the area Shabana Khan said, “He was first to jump off the building. Then, there were more screams that made people living in the colony come out. Over 50 families residing in houses on either side of the burning building scrambled around to save themselves in case the fire spread. People shifted their kids to a distant place in the colony to prevent them from getting suffocated due to dense smoke and fumes coming from the building.”“As the fire raged, there were sounds of blasts ---of tyres, cylinders, fuel tanks of vehicles --- all getting destroyed in the raging blaze,” Shabana said.“The neighbours tried to douse the fire by throwing buckets of water at it. The even used pipes connecting them through motors to their personal boring wells,” a resident of the colony Dinesh

Singh Rathore

said.He said that he and his friend took two persons including their neighbour to a hospital by car in absence of an ambulance. Unfortunately, one of the persons they rescued was declared dead at the hospital.Another resident

Tushar Maindad

said, “A man and two women were rescued from frontside of the building with the help of a rope and around half a dozen people jumped from windows on the backside to save their lives.”“The door of the stairs connecting with roof was closed and the delay in arrival of fire brigade and ambulance led to more deaths,” another resident claimed.