Fire safety report eludes Presidency

Safety recommendations the fire services department had promised to prepare for Presidency University and other educational institutes in the city around nine months ago are yet to be ready.

“We have been slow in preparing the report, which should have been ready much earlier,” said an officer involved in drafting the recommendations. “We are trying to file the report after Puja.”

The department had formed a committee comprising senior officers to draw up the recommendations following a blaze at Presidency on October 29 last year that gutted two chemistry laboratories, and two fires at Asutosh College and Hindu School in close succession.

The committee started inspecting educational institutions in December and promised to submit their recommendations by the end of the month.

Pradip Kumar Sengupta, the registrar of Presidency University, said no recommendations had come from the fire services department.

The October blaze in the two third-floor laboratories had destroyed chemicals, theses and other research papers, equipment and several computers. A classroom and a protein research laboratory on the third floor where also affected.

The two gutted laboratories are being renovated but proper fire-fighting measures may elude them.

“If the fire department’s report had reached us by now, we could have followed the suggestions while rebuilding the laboratories. Once the work is done, the recommendations will be tough to implement,” said a teacher at Presidency University.

Asutosh College principal Dipak Kar said: “I had written to the fire services department to inspect our college and suggest ways to upgrade fire safety measures. They came and inspected our college but the recommendations are yet to come. Still, I have taken some measures based on some verbal recommendations.”

The institutes the fire department team had visited were Hindu School, Asutosh College, Presidency University, Rabindra Bharati University and the Rajabazar, Ballygunge and Salt Lake campuses of Calcutta University.

A college principal said that after the department filed its report, the government should set up a monitoring system to ensure that all the recommendations were followed.