A fireman tries to make his way into Statesman House. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

Calcutta, March 31: A fire broke out for an hour this evening on the ground floor of The Statesman office, a heritage building on CR Avenue, but no major damage was reported.

No one was injured and the blaze did not touch the newsroom, the hub of newspaper activity at night.

The fire started in a room where scrap paper is stored and spread to adjoining rooms housing stand-by machinery, fire officials said.

“The fire also spread to the first floor but it was quickly controlled,” said Anil Kumar, director-general of fire services.

The three-storey building, from where both the 131-year-old English newspaper and the Bengali edition come out, was evacuated as soon as smoke was noticed around 8.30 pm. The power supply to the building and its neighbourhood was switched off as a precaution.

Late at night, CESC officials said the two feeders supplying power to the building and a local transformer were still switched off.

“We will switch them on as soon as it is safe to do so. However, the fire did not spread to the CESC’s switch gear inside the building,” an official said.

As thick smoke billowed out of the building, located in the heart of the city, a crowd gathered before it.

By 9 pm, it had swelled to a few hundred.

Twenty fire tenders worked together to put out the blaze by 9.30 pm, but smoke was still coming out. The firefighters were spraying water till late in the night.

Joint commissioner of police Zulfiquar Hassan said the cause of the fire is being investigated. “We are in touch with the fire brigade and a probe will be conducted after reports are received from forensic experts.”

The editor of The Statesman, Ravindra Kumar, said: “It is very unfortunate. The cause of the fire is yet to be ascertained.”