An asbestos-roofed library being built on the sixth floor of SSKM Hospital to comply with Medical Council of India norms caught fire on Monday morning, stalling two surgeries and exposing the inadequacies of an emergency response system that endangered the lives of 71 patients even after evacuation.
Patients in the burns unit of the six-storey Ronald Ross Block were potentially exposed to infections because of the haphazard manner in which the evacuation was carried out. Most of the patients had to wait for more than an hour after the fire to be either shifted back to their wards or accommodated elsewhere.
Two plastic surgeries that were about to start in the operating theatre on the floor below the 10,000sq ft library that caught fire had to be stopped even after the patients had been anaesthetised.
Chief minister Mamata Banerjee, who visited the hospital soon after news of the fire reached her, didn't rule out sabotage. "We will have to see if the library caught fire or if it was set on fire," she said.
Officials said the library on the sixth floor of the building, named after the British Nobel laureate who discovered that malaria is caused by mosquitoes, was being built as "a semi-permanent structure" with an asbestos roof and a false ceiling. The fire was discovered at 11.15am and it took 19 fire engines around an hour to put out the flames.
"The library was locked from outside at the time of the fire," said Manju Banerjee, director of the Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education and Research at SSKM.
Nobody was injured, but officials said many books and journals might have been lost either to the flames or the water used to douse the blaze.
The portion of the hospital where the fire broke out is thinly populated by the standards of a state-run health care facility like SSKM, the largest in the state. "I shudder to think what might have happened had there been such an incident in the main block, which has 522 beds and five operating theatres spread across five floors," a doctor said.
SSKM struggled to evacuate even the 71 patients in the Ronald Ross Block. The process apparently took long because of a shortage of stretchers and the absence of ramps.
"Since there were no ramps, patients were brought down the stairs. To bring down someone unable to walk from the fifth floor took at least 15 minutes on an average," said an intern who helped in the evacuation.
Several patients were evacuated by their family members and relatives. Some scampered down the stairs on their own. "I thought I would die when black smoke started to fill the ward. I am still unable to walk and it seemed ages before my brother came for me. He had stepped out to buy medicines," said 35-year-old Mamane Gawa from Murshidabad.
Ramps to evacuate patients are not mandatory, but government hospitals like SSKM don't follow even basic fire department guidelines like having smoke alarms, sprinklers and clear signage pointing towards the exits. It is also mandatory to have at least two staircases at either end of each building and hold regular fire drills.
These guidelines were announced after the AMRI Dhakuria fire that claimed 92 lives.
The fire services department has yet to ascertain the "exact cause" of Monday's blaze.
