Gasps of horror in gas trap

KOLKATA: His knee shattered in an accident and his lungs struggling in the soot-choked air, 21-year-old Suman Biswas hurled himself down the stairs at the AMRI annexe building in Dhakuria in the dark, predawn hours of Friday.
He could not stand up or walk. But the young man knew that if he stopped, he would die. He is among the handful of patients who made it out of the gas chamber on their own steam.
And you can still see the trauma in his eyes (he refused to be photographed). It’s a trauma that will haunt him till his last breath, he says.
Last Thursday, Biswas, a resident of Behrampore in Murshidabad (nearly 300km from Kolkata) fell off a bus and broke his knee. The injury was so severe that he had to be brought to Kolkata and admitted to AMRI Dhakuria hospital on Thursday evening. He was in a third-floor ward.
In the wee hours of Friday, he woke up to a choking sensation . His grandfather Paltu Ghosh said: “He called me up around 3.30am to say that a fire had broken out somewhere in the hospital and smoke had engulfed the entire building. He shouted for help but there was no one around.”
Realising that death was minutes away, he dropped off the bed, through excruciating pain, and started crawling towards the stairs. The fumes had become so thick that it was almost impossible to breathe.
“I knew that I could not crawl down. The pain would be unbearable as my knee bumped on every stair. So I just threw myself over and rolled. The agony is indescribable ,” he told TOI, eyes wide in terror. His desperate dive took him to the ground floor where slum dwellers rescued him.
Later in the morning, Biswas was brought to AMRI Salt Lake. “There was still fear written all over his face. He realised that he had narrowly escaped death,” Ghosh said. Biswas was to undergo knee surgery on Saturday. Fifty-seven-year-old Michael Arthur Dominigo still shivers at the thought his close shave with death. The Garden Reach resident was admitted on a third floor ward on December 7 for a bone ailment. He was asleep when the smell of smoke shook him awake.
“I opened the cabin door and found black smoke all around. I could not see any flames but my gut feeling was that I should escape as soon as possible,” said Dominigo, now recovering at Ruby General Hospital.
When Dominigo was about to go out, his eyes felt on the patient he shared his cabin with. The patient was feeble. Dominigo grabbed his hands and asked him to follow him. “It was pitch dark because of the fumes. We could not see anything beyond a foot ahead. There were screams al around us. It made me feel sick but I went ahead towards the stairs holding the wall with one hand and my fellow patient in the other,” Dominigo said.
Someone broke a glass pane near the staircase wall and shone a torch. In that one fleeting moment, Dominigo noticed the staircase. And the pandemonium. “There were a lot many people trying to rush out. They were pushing about wildly. We were shoved hard and I lost my grip on the elderly gentleman. We got separated . I could not find him in the darkness. I regret my failure to save his life,” lamented Dominigo.
Eighty-two-year old Arati Dey will never tire of thanking the firefighters who saved her. On Saturday, 36 hours after the near-death ordeal, she cannot bring herself to talk about it.
Dey was admitted to a fourth floor ward. It was past midnight on Thursday when she heard that there was fire somewhere in the building. “Soon there was the smell of toxic fumes,” she recalls. “I was admitted with a fractured elbow. The firemen entered our room by breaking the window . They practically scooped me up in their arms and took me out. I climbed down the ladder, but they held me tight all along,” Dey said. She has been moved to the AMRI Women & Children Hospital in Mukundapur where 58 survivors were admitted after Friday’s tragedy. Around 20 were discharged on Saturday.