Due to the lack of interest and sheer negligence of Emergency and Disaster Management (E&DM) Directorate of Metropolitan Corporation Islamabad (MCI), more than two hundred buildings which were marked dangerous, are still being used without obtaining NoC from E&DM which puts the lives of hundreds of thousands people at risk.
The recent Awami Markaz incident, which was gutted on September 10, which also took three lives, is the result of that negligence of the civic management, and if the authority still not reacted hard to the violators, it would have resulted in more, and more fire eruption cases which will ultimately increase the number of causalities.
According to the CDA’s Fire and Safety Code 2010, building operators are bound to have fire extinguishing equipment, such as fire hoses on all floors, as well as emergency exits.
In 2016, the E&DM Directorate had marked 257 commercial and 148 industrial buildings as dangerous and not emergency ready and warned the authorities about the “alarming state of affairs” and “poor arrangements” in many plazas and centers of Islamabad which are inviting man-made or natural calamities. But, Awami Center was not amongst the marked ones.
But, unfortunately, it can be said that the said directorate was just restricted itself with issuing notices instead of taking physical action against the violators as it is of the supreme importance. The authority officials, when contacted, acknowledged that Blue Area has scores of plazas that are decades old and are rife with violations of building laws, illegal alterations and lacks fire prevention equipment.
The manner in which electric wiring and other gas utilities are dealt with is haphazard and negligent in most of the multi-floor plazas of capital and in case of any emergency, it would prove life-threatening.
The importance of enforcing the CDA building standards for forwarding prevention and life safety 2010 in embassies, high commissions, and offices of the various NGOs in the diplomatic enclave was also issued but this too, to no avail.
It is important to mention here that, the E&DM and BCS, always passing the buck on taking actions, remove violations, alterations, modifications in the Blue Area and main centers, posing threat to residents, make them obtain structure stability certificates on quarterly basis, install the required amount of emergency exits, make sure that the load-bearing capacity of buildings does not exceed the approved plan.
An official of Building Control Section (BCS) said that every building must have an open or closed staircase.
Moreover, a sprinkler system should be installed to ensure that in case of fire, water is pumped all over the building at the same time. The fire exit should also not be used daily and there should be separate water tanks to cope with fire, he said.
When contacted, MCI’s spokesperson, Mazhar Hussain said that the E&DM had issued notices to the private building owners several times, but they did not installed fire prevention equipment’s, therefore, the authority is mulling to take strict actions this time.
