Kolkata: The back-to-back shanty fires have focused the fire department’s attention on indoor cooking with wooden ovens and dried cow dung cakes, as well as the illegal storage of LPG cylinders.
On Friday, a massive fire gutted around 120 shanties in Topsia, off EM Bypass. On Saturday, another fire under Durgapur Bridge in New Alipore ravaged about 50 shanties. While the cause of the fire is still under investigation, in both cases, residents pointed to the fire starting from inside one shanty while cooking indoors. It soon spread to the rest of the shanties due to the accumulation of combustible materials.
“Usually, people in shanties cook outside their homes, but during the winter, they bring their makeshift cookers inside. Hence, in case a fire breaks out inside a shanty, it becomes impossible to control the blaze. We have also asked cops to check. if the residents of these two slums were storing LPG cylinders illegally,” said a fire department official on Sunday.
Jui Biswas, New Alipore councillor, spoke about how the settlers were stacking LPG cylinders illegally and posing a danger to the entire neighborhood by cooking inside their combustible homes using wood ovens.
On Sunday, TOI visited the slum under Durgapur Bridge and found hundreds of homeless people scouring through the ashes, trying to retrieve whatever they could. “I had saved gold jewelery for my daughter’s wedding and some cash. Everything is gone,” said Sunita Singh, while lamenting beside her burnt home as her daughter Mamata and son Sonu scavenged through the burnt debris. Residents said they lost everything—clothes, television sets, identity cards, food grains, and cash.
Distraught and displaced, most women spent the night with their children at a local school in New Alipore. The local councilor and state administration arranged food and warm clothes for the victims. According to sources, in the early 2000s, only a few laborers working at the nearby railway siding used to stay under the bridge with temporary shelters. But over the years, it developed into a full-fledged slum, with many residents even setting up brick walls with tiled and bamboo roofs.
