New Koilaghat building fire hits 700 railway ticket reservation counters The servers in the building are used by six zonal railways for their online as well as offline bookings
Railway ticket reservation counters from Calcutta to Hyderabad, Mughalsarai in Uttar Pradesh and Assam’s Tinsukia had stopped working for several hours since Monday night after the fire at Eastern Railway’s New Koilaghat Building forced officials to cut power supply to the servers inside the building.
Railways officials said around 700 passenger reservation counters or points used by passengers to reserve seats were stalled because of the fire in the 14-storied building.
Sanoj Sahani, brother of fire victim RPF jawan Sanjoy Sahani, at SSKM Hospital on Tuesday.
KOLKATA: Sanjay Sahani (36) from Railway Protection Force was not even slated to be in the fire- ravaged Strand Road building on Monday had his senior - Partha Sarathi Mondal, deputy chief commercial manager (database) of Eastern Railway - not come to the New Koilaghat Building from his Sealdah office around late afternoon.
But as fate would have it, both Sahani and Mondal suffered a horrific death inside a lift - asphyxiated and charred - after they had possibly reached the 13th floor accidentally while trying to go down from the second-floor office.
Worked for: West Bengal Fire and Emergency Services as an auxiliary fire operator
Purkait was one of those who had jumped into the rescue of patients at the AMRI Hospital in Dhakuria after a fire broke out at the hospital in December 2011, leaving 92 dead. He was only 14 then but did not think twice before joining few others in bringing out the trapped patients.
On Monday night too, Purkait didn’t think twice and was one of the first to enter the building when fire was engulfing the 13th floor, said his colleagues. Purkait was in one of the elevators and his body was recovered along with several others.
Kolkata fire: Amid political slugfest, victims families numb with grief
Preliminary findings suggested that the blaze was caused by an electrical short-circuit on the 13th floor of the New Koilaghat Building, owned by Eastern Railway (ER).
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Police officials pay gun salute to Kolkata Police officer Amit Bhawal who lost his life in Eastern Railways Headquarters fire tragedy. (Photo | PTI) By PTI
KOLKATA: A devastating fire at a multistoreyed building here that claimed nine lives turned into the epicentre of a political slugfest on Tuesday, with the TMC government and the BJP pointing accusatory fingers at the Railways and the state administration respectively, even as the bereaved families grieved at the loss of their near ones.