Kolkata:
The music stopped, the food was left incomplete and the light of the enlightened wedding hall of a central Kolkata Dharamshala was stopped, as 14 people died in a huge fire in a adjacent hotel.
The nervousness killed the wedding guests, as the situation outside the ‘Arya Samaj Dharmashala’ on Madan Mohan Burman Street in Burbazar area became chaotic as a fire spread in the Rituraj Hotel a few meters away on Tuesday evening.
“Around 150–200 guests, a large number of women and children, were present in the building courtyard and nearby banquet halls, when we surrounded the four floors of the hotel building and saw the thick smoke and came out,” said Haran Sardar, who is associated with the management of Dharmashala.
Their primary concern was that the flames were to stop the flames from spreading to the religious building and taking the guests out to a safe place.
Sardar told PTI, “Dharamshala officials stopped the lights as a precautionary measure and kept only one to help the guests move.”
Dharmashala’s management breathed a sigh of relief as all the guests, including the bride and the bride, left the place around midnight through one end of a lane, while the rescue and fire operations were in full swing in the neighboring premises.
He said, “We were looking helpless because some people in the hotel roof waved their mobile torch to seek help to the people standing on the ground,” he said.
Fire brigade personnel brought some of them down with the help of ladder and ropes and Dharmashala provided them with drinking water. Empty hotel guests were released as dawn.
“It was a sad vision because the dead bodies wrapped in the cover are brought down from the burnt hotel one after the other,” he said.
Another marriage is going to be held in the same religious on Wednesday.
Sardar said, “We requested families to reduce the festival. We asked them not to play any music or defeat the drum and not to install any decorative gates at the entrance.” Only the decoration of flowers can occur inside. ,
One of the local youth, Mayank Gupta, who risked his life to reach the first three floors to save the people, said that he managed to save four to five people.
“They were panting … We took them to a hospital,” Gupta said that works in a transport company located in the area.
He claimed that the people who extinguished the fire at the budget hotel were rowed on the wall, but those devices did not work.
Ravi Sau, an employee of a tea stall located in front of the disaster site, saw in a scary form that his friend Manoj Paswan, an employee of the hotel, killed the upper floor Kangani.
“I broke my heart. However, thankfully about 30 other hotel staff chose to wait until help comes. Some of them are in the hospital,” Sau said from Odisha.
All the shops around the hotel were closed on Wednesday, while the police stopped the lane and the crowd was standing on both sides of the road.
Officials said that most people allegedly lost their lives due to suffocation, and the explosion also injured 13 others.
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is published by a syndicated feed.)
