A chilling discovery after Old Dhaka fire

In a blood-curdling discovery, fire service officials have found a huge amount of highly combustible materials stashed in the basement of Wahed Manzil, the building which suffered the most damage in the Chawkbazar fire.

The chemicals in the basement were not reached by the fire fuelled by high pressure deodorant canisters and raw plastic granules stored on the other floors of the four-storey building.

The fire crews shivered to imagine what would have happened had the fire reached the basement of the building.

Ratan Kumar Debnath, a station officer at the Fire Service and Civil Defence, said the goods in the basement included rolls of plastic sheets and drums full of imported pigments.

“These substances used to dye textiles are highly flammable. The fire would have been much bigger and it would have been very difficult to douse it if these caught fire,” he added.

It took some 15 hours for the fire fighters to douse the flames that burnt down a number of vehicles on the street and five buildings at Churihatta overnight on Wednesday.

The fire has claimed at least 67 lives and twenty-four of the bodies were found in Wahed Manzil.

The building has two sections – Wahed Manzil and Wahed Mansion. The ground floor housed around a dozen shops while the first floor was used as warehouses of perfumes and raw plastic.

Several families lived on the two other floors. The section housing the shops and warehouses was called Wahed Mansion.

Warehouses made up the entirety of Wahed Mansion’s second floor, said Mehedi Ahmed Ansari, a member of the Dhaka South City Corporation’s probe team, after visiting the site of the inferno.

Mehedi, also a professor at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), added that the buildings did not have enough stairways.

“The buildings didn’t have any fire-fighting equipment and weren’t constructed in compliance with the building code. The blaze may have been sparked by an exploding cylinder but it spread because of the chemicals.”

The ground floor and the second floor of Wahid Manzil suffered the most damage in the blaze, said Professor Mehedi. The beams and columns of the third and fourth floors did not suffer as much damage. But tests will be conducted to determine the extent of damage there, he added. Whether the building is fit for use will be revealed after a week.

The warehouses were set up illegally in the residential area without any permission.

Quoting a resident of the area, ‘Nazrul’, bdnews24.com reported that the Wahed Manzil was built by one Hajji Abdul Wahed 25 years ago and the basement was being used to store chemicals from the beginning even though it was made for parking cars.

The owner of the warehouse, Hajji Shamim, is a “big businessman” who imports raw plastic and dye, according to Nazrul.