Search
Home / West-bengal / Calcutta / Nothing left of 40 years of hard work, recalls an official of Strand Road railway office Nothing left of 40 years of hard work, recalls an official of Strand Road railway office The staff narrates the last minutes spent in the building before he was forced to leave and run on Monday night
A senior railway official who has his office on the 13th floor of New Koilaghat building on Strand Road recalled the moment he saw fire in one of the rooms on the same floor. The flames gradually engulfed everything, including files he had been maintaining for the last four decades.
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).
Share Via Email
| A+A A-
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.
An official of the Eastern Railway said that they had cut off power supply in the building from around 6pm. But the silver lining was that till late on Monday there was no damage to the servers and the fire had not spread to the rooms where the servers are installed.
The official, however, could not give a time by which the online booking could resume. Whenever the booking begins, the speed could be very slow, the official warned.
According to officials of the Eastern Railways, the signal and telecom department construction office on the 13th floor had caught fire that later spread across the floor and to the floor below.
Railway Minister Piyush Goyal has set up a high-level committee to ascertain the cause of the fire at an Eastern Railway office building in Kolkata in which nine people were killed on Monday. The fire, which broke out on the 13th floor of the sprawling New Koilaghat building on Strand Road at around 6.10 pm on Monday, is now under control and the cooling process is on, officials said. Sincere condolences to the families of the nine brave deceased including the four firefighters, two Railways personnel and a police ASI who have been fighting the fire at the Eastern Railways Strand road office in Kolkata.