Fire blocks stairs, residents seek windows of escape

MUMBAI: Families frantically trying to evacuate the building were trapped as the wooden stairway, the primary escape route, was engulfed in flames. Some desperately tried to jump out of windows, others found ladders and ropes provided by people from adjoining buildings. Residents said when the fire brigade arrived 25 minutes after the fire started, most people had been evacuated.
Deepika Phansekar (26) was forced to throw her 11-month-old son Pranay out of the window to save him from the flames. Luckily for Pranay, the crowd below caught him. However, when Deepika jumped, the crowd could not catch her and she sustained multiple fractures. Her husband Manish had managed to escape earlier through the staircase, the only way out of their third-floor flat. “I threw my child as we were burning in the heat and everybody below told us to jump,” said Deepika, speaking through an oxygen mask at Nair Hospital later on Thursday afternoon. However, Arvind, Deepika’s father-in-law, could not jump and was charred to death before firemen reached the house.
The Alexanders were luckier. Vincent Alexander (27) said when the family woke up at 7 am, there was a lot of smoke. “We jumped to the adjacent under-construction building and then climbed down a ladder,” said Vincent, whose father John (56) suffered extreme burns. His aunt Alice (54) escaped with minor burns.
Naresh Parmar escaped from his ground-floor flat and ensured his family’s safety before aiding rescue efforts. With five men from the neighboring Firoza building, he arranged three ladders to help people climb out of windows. “We brought two ladders from the nearby Fire temple and rescued 15 people in half an hour,” he said. Kishore Solanki, who lives on the eighth floor of the German Darshan building, also managed to place a ladder on a second floor window, helping several people out.
Senior citizens were worst affected. Many were too scared to climb out of windows as some were afraid of heights while others were too traumatized by the events. A 70-plus woman was so shocked that she refused to let anyone help her climb out of the window. “My mother was so taken aback that she went into trauma. We kept on coaxing her to come out but she didn’t let either the fire officers or her family members touch her. After much persuasion, we were able to get her out,” said her son Mahadev Vishwanathan. She was later taken to the railway hospital.