Preliminary investigations have revealed that a short circuit in the electric meter room on the ground floor of the building caused the fire.
On that fateful Saturday evening, when a team of fire department officials entered Gokul Niwas to douse the massive inferno, they learnt about a mobile phone repair shop in the ground floor of the building. As per police records, nearly 2,500 to 3,000 phone batteries were stored in the shop, and as the heat increased, they continued to explode and proved to be a major hurdle in the fire-dousing operation.
Police inspector Rajkumar Kothmire of LT Marg police station witnessed the entire incident. Speaking to dna, he said, "When fire officers SW Rane and M Desai entered the ground floor, chief fire officer Sunil Nesarikar and deputy fire officer Sudhir Amin followed them. The explosion of the mobile phone batteries at the repair shop hampered the operation."
As the firefighting operation progressed, a slab of the first floor collapsed around 6.30pm, and a fireball injured chief fire officer Nesarikar, who fell out of the building.
Deputy chief fire officer Sudhir Amin, who sustained 80 per cent burn injuries, got stuck in the debris. According to fire brigade officials present at the spot, the entire building collapsed within a minute after Amin was rescued, but the deceased officers got trapped in it.
While preliminary investigations have revealed that a short circuit in the electric meter room on the ground floor of the building caused the fire, deputy chief fire officer P Rahangdale said, "With so much debris at the spot, it will be very difficult to investigate the exact cause of the fire."
Rahangdale added that a gold jewellery manufacturing unit at the fourth floor of the building could also have contributed to the fire that spread rapidly across the building.
Meanwhile the police said that the third floor had a nylon saree shop which also increased the spread of the fire. The police have seized five gas cylinders from the debris, of which three were filled and two had exploded.
"Since the important documents of the occupants, too, are expected to have been destroyed in the fire, the process to ascertain whether any of the cylinders were procured illegally would take time," Kothmire said.
The LT Marg police have registered an accidental death case in the matter and have recorded statements of the fire brigade officials whom were killed in the fire.
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