Cigarette butt started blaze in Malad East slum, says fire brigade
This was the third fire in the Appa Pada area since January and each fire had broken out on the 13th of the month.
Mumbai: Careless disposal of a cigarette butt sparked a fire in a garbage heap that in turn led to the massive blaze that gutted nearly 2,000 hutments and killed one person at the Appa Pada slum cluster in Malad East on March 13.
Some locals believe that the fire first started in a nearby chawl after a cylinder burst in a kitchen. “Some residents have also been saying that the fire emanated from the nearby forest since there is a lot of dry grass around,” chief fire officer Sanjay Manjrekar told Hindustan Times. “But we have ascertained that it was due to a cigarette butt or possibly an ignited matchstick that set the garbage ablaze and then spread through the hutments.”
Vinod Mishra, the BJP’s former group leader in the BMC, said this was the third fire in the Appa Pada area since January, and mysteriously enough, each fire had broken out on the 13th of the month. The first fire happened in January in the same area, and the second one, which claimed the life of a 12-year-old boy, erupted on February 13 at Jamrishi Nagar, which is also a part of Appa Pada. The third one March 13 in Appa Pada was 500 metres away from Jamrishi Nagar.
While the Maharashtra government announced the setting up of a special investigation team to find out if there was any “ill intention” behind the fire in March, Mumbai’s guardian minister Mangal Prabhat Lodha ordered a survey to be conducted by the tehsil office to assess the losses and the number of people affected in Appa Pada’s fire.
“A total of 1,050 houses were damaged as per the survey,” Lodha told Hindustan Times. “ ₹13k will be given by the rehabilitation department to each household, and chief minister Eknath Shinde will announce another relief amount on Tuesday from the Chief Minister’s Relief Fund.”
Mishra, on his part, told HT that the government had announced a compensation of ₹50,000 for every affected hut. “As of now, the survivors have covered the ruins of their homes with tarpaulin and plastic sheets and are living in the same spot,” he said. “Since it is a forest area, they cannot build permanent homes now.”
Electrician Ramanand Gupta, an affected resident of Appa Pada, said that a differently abled person became the only casualty on March 13, as he was unable to escape like the other residents. Gupta rued that he was living with his wife and two children amid debris and in a state of ruin “like pavement dwellers” when he earlier lived in a one-room-kitchen flat in Durga Chawl with water and electricity.
“We now get two buckets of water and have to take turns to bathe,” he said. “We get breakfast, lunch and dinner from the BMC as of now. Several NGOs have given us household goods, mats and buckets. I have been told we will get ₹50,000 from the government.”