Six in the morning in Kurla West is a loud hour. Local trains, pressure cookers, the first round of school vans. On Tuesday, October 20, it got louder. Residents of the Kohinoor HDIL building, a ground-plus-12-storey residential block in Kurla West, woke to the smell of burning plastic and then the smoke, thick enough to fill the stairwells. The Mumbai Kurla fire was reported to the Mumbai Fire Brigade at 6:53 am.
It lived inside the building’s electrical duct. The fire brigade’s update, issued at 10:40 am, said the blaze was confined to electrical wiring and installations in the duct, along with iron doors on various floors. Duct fires behave differently from room fires: they climb. The shaft carries smoke to floors the flames never reach, which is exactly what happened here. Firefighters had the blaze out by 7:21 am, 28 minutes after the first call, the brigade said.
It was the smoke, not the flames, that did the damage.
Of the 9 people hospitalised, eight were admitted for suffocation after breathing in smoke, civic officials told PTI. The ninth, a 55-year-old man, injured his right leg. All were taken to Rajawadi Hospital. Dr Varma, a medical officer at the hospital, confirmed to the Free Press Journal that all nine were in stable condition.
The injured include a five-year-old boy, two teenage girls aged 14 and 17, and a 65-year-old man, the Free Press Journal and Mid-Day reported, publishing the full list of names: Eshan Ahemad, 30; Mohamad Shaik, 5; Farina Bono, 27; Ejas Ahemad, 65; Farin Shaikh, 18; Naidaya Shaik, 14; Kalima Saha, 45; Alina Shaik, 17; and Jahed Ali Shaik, 55.
Two fires before breakfast
Here is the part of Tuesday morning that deserves more than a footnote. At 8:01 am, barely forty minutes after the Kurla blaze was declared out, the fire brigade got another call: a fire at Amar Sons Store on Bhulabhai Desai Road, near Breach Candy Hospital in Mahalaxmi. The brigade declared it a Level 1 fire at 8:20 am. No injuries were reported in the initial update, and the cause and extent of damage were unknown, the BMC’s fire control room said.
Two fires, two ends of the city, one morning. Neither cause is known yet. That is not a pattern; it is a coincidence. But it is the kind of coincidence that makes a fire officer’s Tuesday feel longer than it already is.
What the Mumbai Kurla fire leaves behind
Ask anyone who lives in a Mumbai high-rise about the electrical duct and you will get a shrug. It is the part of the building nobody owns and everybody depends on: a vertical shaft of cables, switches and junction boxes running floor to floor, inspected rarely, noticed only when something goes wrong. Tuesday’s fire wrote out the script again. The alarm went up at 6:53. The shaft carried the smoke upward. People on the upper floors choked before anything burned near them.
The response, to be fair, was fast. The Mumbai Fire Brigade, the police, Adani’s power teams, a 108 ambulance crew and civic ward staff were all at the spot, the Times of India reported. In a city where high-rise fires have a way of turning into national headlines, 28 minutes from call to control is a result the brigade will want to hold on to.
What nobody can say yet is why the duct caught fire, or how far the damage goes. The cause has not been established, and officials are still assessing the building, the Economic Times reported, citing civic authorities.
For a city still absorbing Sunday night’s gunfire in Juhu, Tuesday morning added a quieter reminder: in Mumbai, the emergencies that fill hospital wards are often the ones that start inside the walls. There are echoes here of the festival season’s other tragedies, the stampede at a Kolkata Durga Puja pandal and the truck that ran into crowds near Gwalior’s Shitla Mata temple: ordinary infrastructure, turned lethal, in the middle of an ordinary day. The injured in Kurla were lucky in the one way that matters. They are all expected to go home.