NOIDA: A 17-day-old girl and her 10-year-old brother died after their shanty was gutted in a fire possibly caused by a gas cylinder blast in Sector 8 early on Sunday.Their parents and two relatives suffered injuries and were admitted to Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi. Fire department officials claimed they reached the slum in mere “four minutes” after receiving a call and doused the flames over the next 20 minutes. “But the jhuggi was gutted by then,” said Pradeep Kumar Chaubey, the chief fire officer.The 6 by 6ft shanty was home to six members of the family. The deceased were identified as Armaan (10) and his newborn sister, who was yet to be given a name. Their father Rizwan (32), mother Shabana (30), another brother Ahad (4) and cousin Nisha (20) were admitted to Safdarjung with 20-30% burns.Rizwan, police said, was a daily-wage labourer and had been living in the Sector 8 slum for the past decade.According to Chaubey, they received a call about the fire a little after 2.50am. Two fire tenders reached the slum in four minutes and doused the flames, he said.”The newborn girl had died by the time we found her. A few minutes later, we found the charred body of her brother. The injured members of the family were rescued and taken to the District Hospital in Sector 30. But they were referred to Safdarjung after their condition deteriorated. Shabana is stated to be critical,” the fire officer added.The fire fighters managed to control the blaze before it could spread to other shanties, mostly made of highly inflammable material such as plastic and tarpaulin. An inspection revealed the fire started from a cooking gas cylinder blast.”We found a cylinder with a fisheye hole, suggesting there might have been a leak and subsequent blast. It is possible that the mother might have woken up at night to warm milk for the newborn. Since there was a leak, the cylinder exploded when the matchstick was lit. Neighbours also told us about a loud explosion,” Chaubey said.Roshan Ali, who lives a few shanties away, informed the police after being jolted out of sleep by loud shrieks and plumes of smoke. “We broke the door of Rizwan’s shanty, but could not get inside because of the flames. A fire department team reached the spot and rescued the occupants,” he said.Ali claimed though Rizwan and the other injured persons were brought out of the burning shanty within minutes, it took almost an hour for an ambulance to reach the spot. “So, we arranged for a car and took them to the District Hospital. It was only on January 26 that the little girl had come into this world. Shabana had decided to call her Ariba,” he said.Data sourced from the fire department revealed that Noida reported 1,514 blazes last year, when four persons were killed and over 50 injured.In February 2022, two workers of a spa centre in Sector 53 died when a fire broke out on the premises. The spa had been closed for some time because of pandemic-related curbs and went up in flames when the two were cleaning the premises.On December 23, two persons died in a fire in a warehouse storing cardboards in Bisrakh.
Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/noida/17-day-old-girl-her-brother-10-die-in-noida-as-shanty-goes-up-in-flames/articleshow/97849252.cms
