AHMEDABAD, May 1: At least 16 Corona patients, some of them on ventilators, and two staff nurses were killed in a devastating fire in a designated Covid-19 hospital in Bharuch district in central Gujarat in the wee hours of Saturday, which also happened to be the Gujarat Foundation Day.
The official sources said the fire broke out around 1 A.M. in the ICU ward of The Welfare Hospital on the Bharuch- Jambusar by-pass. Locals broke the glass windows and rescued the other patients. Sources said there were around 27 patients in the ICU ward at the time of the fire while there were around 50 other patients in the four- storeyed hospital when the fire broke out in the COVID-19 ward at 1 am. All the patients rescued by the local people and the fire-fighters were shifted to nearby private hospitals
The cause of the fire was not immediately known but it was suspected to had been caused by electric short-circuit.
The Gujarat Chief minister Vijay Rupani appointed two senior bureaucrats — Additional Chief Secretary (labour and employment) Vipul Mittra and Commissioner (municipalities) Rajkumar Beniwal — to rush to Broach for an inquiry. Rupani said a judicial probe would also be initiated.
The Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his condolences, saying, “Pained by the loss of lives due to a fire at a hospital in Bharuch.. Condolences to the bereaved families.”
An ex-gratia aid of Rs 4 lakh would be given to each of the next of kin of the victims from the Chief Minister’s Relief Fund, Rupani said, while expressing grief over the incident.
Since last year, the hospital is being used to treat Covid-19 patients of the district.
Fire department officials believed that a short circuit might have led to the blaze when the patients were sleeping. After noticing the fire, the hospital staff tried to rescue the patients who were on ventilators. The locals, after hearing about the incident, also rushed to the spot to help.
Fire tenders, too, reached immediately and controlled the blaze within half-an-hour, eye-witness accounts said.
(Manas Dasgupta)
