Ghaziabad: Nine members of a family, including two senior citizens, were trapped on the third floor of a three-storey residential building in Indirapuram’s Niti Khand-2 on Tuesday afternoon after a gas cylinder burst on the ground floor, triggering the explosion of three more cylinders and engulfing the stilt parking area in fire.Firefighters broke through an iron grille and a setback wall separating the terrace from an adjacent building, and brought the family down to safety through its staircase.Officials said the building’s narrow setback proved critical to the evacuation. It was the absence of a setback in Sunday’s Vivek Vihar fire in Delhi that had hindered the rescue operation and led to the death of nine people in a basement-plus-four-storey building with a single staircase and no emergency exit. Protective iron grilles on the front facade and a locked terrace had further hampered rescue efforts there.The blaze had started one floor below, in a small quarter where the building’s shared security guard, Manish, lived with his family. His wife was cooking when a gas cylinder burst, igniting a fire that spread rapidly through the parking area and sent the two small and one large cylinders stored there into successive explosions.Manish managed to get his wife and two children out and raise the alarm. But by then, black smoke had already found the stairwell, the building’s only escape route, and was rising fast.The building, on plot number 495 in Niti Khand-2, is a modest three-floor structure with a stilt parking below, one family per floor above. The Aggarwals on the first floor were abroad. The Dwivedi family on the second floor got out safely. It was the Guptas on the third — JP Gupta (75), his wife Prabha (75) and seven others, including three children, the youngest just three years old — who found themselves with nowhere to go.When smoke began seeping through the floorboards, Prabha herded her family into the bathroom and shut the door.“As smoke filled every corner of the flat. We moved from the bathroom to my younger son’s room,” Prabha said. “We waited for nearly 30 minutes before help arrived.”According to chief fire officer Rahul Pal, the rescue team reached the trapped residents and moved them to the terrace using ladders raised from the rear balcony. They broke through a terrace grille and setback wall, evacuating the family through the adjacent building.Pal said five fire engines had reached Niti Khand-2, two of them engines and two water bowsers, carrying 22,000 and 14,000 litres respectively, from Vaishali station. A third engine was set from Sahibabad. Pal said the first units arrived around 1.30 pm to find the ground floor fully engulfed.The fire was out in roughly 45 minutes, the officer said. Five motorcycles and three bicycles in the parking lot were removed on time. This is the second fire incident in Indirapuram in less than a week. On April 29, a blaze at Gaur Green Avenue gutted eight flats across five floors.
