FIRE safety is essential for all residential and commercial buildings, particularly for high rise structures of today. It is more important for shopping malls where thousands of people assemble everyday to buy articles of necessity or luxury. Necessity of fire safety is more keenly felt during times of festivals like Eid when markets and shopping malls are regularly crowded by a large number of people. For obvious reasons summer and dry seasons are the most fire accident prone periods in our country causing extensive damages to people and property.
Many high rise shopping malls, markets and buildings have appeared in recent years and many of them do not have adequate safety arrangement. Number of extinguishers, insurance coverage and security management of these buildings are inadequate. Most of these buildings do not have sufficient side space for the fire service vehicles and other extinguishing instruments which increases the chances of stampedes and other fatalities.
It is alarming that only five shopping malls and markets out of 1300 have self-contained safety arrangement in Dhaka City. This was disclosed by a report on a survey conducted by the Department of Fire Service and Civil Defence. Recently we witnessed a large scale fire accident at Bashundhara City Shopping Mall where Fire department had serious problems in combating the fire that broke out on the 11th floor and beyond. It is therefore important that all shopping malls and tall buildings should have their own fire safety arrangement. We urge upon the government to monitor the fire safety arrangement of all shopping malls and buildings on a regular basis to bring down incidents of fire in the country.
Md. Zillur Rahaman
Islami Bank Bangladesh Ltd
Lalmohan Branch, Bhola
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