Fire at Indian Hospital Kills 89 as Staff Flees

A horrific blaze at a hospital in Kolkata, India is now being under investigation. This fire had killed close to 90 people as staff had fled. At this moment, six hospital officials were arrested and charged with culpable homicide. The hospital was also revoked its license because of the tragedy was poorly handled by its staff. There have been many questions about how the fire was treated by the hospital’s staff, and because of this an investigation is being made. CTV’s South Asia Bureau Chief Janis Mackey Frayer told the CTV news channel that “It took hours they say for the fire trucks to show up at the hospital and then they struggled to get trucks down the narrow lane to access the hospital.” Many local residents said they tried to help with the situation inside of the hospital, but were prevented to by the hospital security guards, which told them that everything was under control. Shockingly, the body guards still stopped the local residents from entering even though many residents and occupants from the hospital had called others from cell phones outside of the hospital in complete fear and terror of their lives. Unfortunately, most patients had died from the fumes and smoke suffocation. The only people that had helped the patients out of the fire were the rescue workers who had used ladders to smash through windows to help free the patients before they had suffocated form the fumes. In total, the rescue workers had pulled 73 people from the building, and another 16 died later from their injuries. The West Bengal state minister of public health engineering, Subrata Mukherjee, said it was "horrifying that the hospital authorities did not make any effort to rescue trapped patients,” and that disappointingly “"Senior hospital authorities ran away after the fire broke out."

I find this whole story incredibly shocking. I think that the hospital had every right to have its license revoked on the grounds that their staff had not been properly trained, or that they had made such selfish actions to not even attempt at rescuing the helpless patients around them. I hope that the investigation is run deep enough so that all staff that had fled and selfishly committed many acts of homicide are brought to justice. I can see how many would act on natural instincts to protect them selves from the fire before others, but these people work at the hospital and are trained to help those patients under the circumstances of life endangerment. It is the hospital staff’s duties to protect and increase the longevity of their patient’s lives, not leave them to die in a fire and hear them scream cries of help as flames engulf the building. If I were in this situation, I know I would try to help out as much as I am able to do, however I still would be trying to protect my own life. My own life in this situation would come before others because of natural instincts, but I would still help many people before leaving or assisting the emergency rescue team. If I were in this situation and committed the exact actions of most of the hospital’s staff, I could never live with the guilt that I would leave many innocent and helpless people to die in a burning flame. It is a shame that a hospital has now succumbed to being shut down because of the fact of these selfish actions, seeing as many areas of the world are in need of more hospitals, never less. I hope that justice is brought in many of these cases associated with this event.

SOURCE: CTV.ca news staff

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/World/20111209/india-hospital-fire-111209/