They need not have died

The fire that killed 10 people and injured 22 in a mall on Karachi’s Rashid Minhas Road once again raised questions about attitudes towards safety in all of the country’s urban centres.
In a coincidence that can only be described as bizarre, experts at a symposium in Karachi only on Wednesday had said that 90 percent of the buildings in Karachi had no firefighting system. As a result, it had been said, in all urban centres, 15.000 people lost their lives a year, while over a trillion rupees a year were also lost in fires. At the seminar, caretaker Sindh Industries, Commerce and Revenue Minister Yunus Dagha said that a meeting of the SITE board would be held in the coming week, and the seminar’s proposals would be adopted. His initiative would have come too late for the mall, for while the proposals he would have presented would be quite detailed, the problem with the mall turned out to be painfully simple: it lacked a fire exit.
Apart from old buildings built in a less regulated era, which need some design rectification, the problem with new buildings is they are not held to any standard, and their electrical and gas plans do not get checked by any authority.
The provincial governments apparently do not see the need to designate a civic authority which can enforce fire safety regulations on the,. It is essential for the governments first of all to prepare s set of fire safety precaution. At the moment, organizations are left to their own/ devices as far as fire safety goes. As ters;t. Employees pay little attention to the kind of occupational environment they face. Until these changes are made,ci tragedies as the one in Karachi will keep occurring..