Pump worker dies of burns, blaze guts slum Glare on weld & fill

- Bid to ban filling-cum-service stations

OUR BUREAU

Firemen fight the flames at Camac Fuel Pump last Tuesday (top) and at a Bypass slum on Sunday night in picture by Sanjoy Ghosh

The fuel pump blaze last Tuesday claimed its first casualty on Sunday morning with an employee dying of burns even as police contemplated writing to the civic body to ban filling and service stations on the same premises.

The city's tryst with fire continued in the evening with 125 shanties being gutted.

Pump fire victim Khurshid Alam, 30, had been servicing vehicles with a colleague in the car wash section of Camac, the fuel station at the crossing of Camac Street and Middleton Street, when it caught fire around 7.30 that evening.

The Topsia resident was hospitalised with 90 per cent burns.

Khurshid's death comes within two months of the AMRI Dhakuria tragedy that took 91 lives, most of them patients.

The fuel pump blaze would have been a bigger disaster had the fire brigade not doused the flames before they could spread to the underground fuel reservoir a few metres away.

The fire services department and the family of Supreme Court advocate Shipra Ghosh, who co-owns 2E and 2F Camac Street with her sister, have since filed separate FIRs accusing Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd of not ensuring adequate fire safeguards at the fuel pump. But nobody has been arrested so far.

The Ghosh family's first-floor house atop the gutted service centre at 2F has been without power since the fire.