Death by negligence

Eighty lives — that is the toll now quantified in the KMC Fire Department’s report presented to the judicial commission probing the Gul Plaza blaze. Despite multiple fire safety audits by Civil Defence and KMC, the gutted shopping plaza of Karachi lacked alarm systems, sprinklers, hydrants and functional emergency exits. The report does not speak in conditionals. It concludes, plainly, that serious violations of fire safety protocols turned a commercial plaza into a killing field. Among the dead is firefighter Furqan, who gave his life trying to undo what years of regulatory dereliction had made inevitable.

The horror inside Gul Plaza that January 17 night was compounded at every turn by failures that were entirely preventable as per the report. When electricity was cut as a precautionary measure, the blackout plunged an estimated 2,000 to 2,500 people into darkness, triggering panic as smoke-filled corridors and staircases reduced visibility to near zero. Thirteen of the sixteen exits were locked. Thirty bodies were eventually recovered from a single crockery store on the mezzanine floor. These are not the casualties of an unforeseeable disaster but of a system that routinely issued warnings it never enforced and approved plans it never inspected. The judicial inquiry commission must not allow its report to become shelf material.

The Government of Sindh must now act decisively on three critical areas. First, there must be mandatory fire safety audits of all commercial buildings in Karachi, with immediate closure orders for non-compliant structures. Second, fire and rescue services must be merged under a single unified command with properly trained personnel and modernised equipment. Third, criminal accountability must be pursued against regulatory authorities and whoever signed off on safety clearances for Gul Plaza across its operational life. Pakistan has a grim tradition of national tragedies followed by national amnesia. This must now be broken.