The seven-storey Annexe I of AMRI Hospitals in Dhakuria was a chamber of death from where there was no escape.

Sealed windows, shut emergency exits, missing fire safety personnel, a fire alarm that didn’t go off and automatic sprinklers that failed to react even at 300-plus degrees Celsius were just a few of the factors that went against the 90 victims of the tragedy, the majority of them critically ill patients.

Fire department officials said the toll would have been less had the hospital opted for sliding windows that a patient could open with an outstretched arm from his or her bed.

In the absence of an outlet for the columns of noxious smoke coming in through the air-conditioning vents and the elevator shaft, everyone confined to a bed had little chance of surviving for more than an hour after the fire began around 2.15am.

“In any case, the fire in the basement itself was detected late because nobody was there. And then the hospital staff committed the grave error of not informing the fire brigade immediately,” an official said.

Each floor in the building has an air-handling unit that is used to condition and circulate air as part of the heating, ventilating and air-conditioning system.

Fire department officials said smoke could have been prevented from entering the floors had trained staff been deployed on every floor to turn off the units.

“From what we gathered, the hospital staff just didn’t know what to do in the immediate aftermath of the fire in the basement. Clueless as they were, most of them abandoned the building, leaving the patients to die,” the director of fire services, Gopal Bhattacharjee, said.

Even something as basic as switching off power supply to the air-conditioning plant wasn’t done until fire brigade personnel reached the site.

“Power supply to the unit for more than two hours after the fire meant smoke continued to travel through the AC ducts to the upper floors. By the time we reached the top, there was so much thick, black smoke all around that you could hardly see a couple of feet ahead,” Bhattacharjee said.

More than 95 per cent of the windows in the centrally air-conditioned building were permanently sealed, which experts said was against standard fire-safety norms.

“In a hospital, where almost every potential victim is confined to a bed, having sealed windows and no other ventilation is an invitation to disaster,” the official said.

The basement — the fire broke out in Tier I — was stocked with inflammable materials like cables, paper, polythene, chemicals and spirit instead of being used for what it was meant to be: a parking lot.

Worse, the fire department had issued a no-objection certificate to the hospital a few months ago.

“We need to find out how such a certificate was issued when there was so much to object to,” a senior official said.

If flouting all the fire-safety guidelines in the book weren’t enough, the hospital allegedly didn’t have any evacuation plan for an emergency. Nobody remembers when the last fire-safety drill was carried out to test the alarm and the sprinklers that didn’t work on Friday.

The private guards deployed at the hospital didn’t help anybody’s cause either by preventing residents of the nearby colony from mounting a rescue effort.

The volunteers, most of them youths, finally got in by breaking through a portion of the wall at the back of the hospital.

“All malls, hospitals, banks and offices are supposed to deploy a group of personnel trained in dousing fire. That is the most basic requirement. At AMRI, not only did the staff fail to save lives, they worsened the scale of the tragedy by not seeking help when they should have,” a firefighter said.

Do you know of any victim/survivor in the AMRI tragedy? Tell ttmetro@abpmail.com