Ghaziabad: Around 90% of hotels and hospitals in Ghaziabad do not have a ‘no-objection certificate’ (NOC) from the fire department, officials said.
Even the fire fighting equipment installed in these buildings do not work properly.
The fire department has now started an inspection of the same.
In the first three months of 2021, 211 cases of fire have been reported in the district as against 178 during the same period in 2018.
A senior officer in the fire department said that only 27 of the 200-plus hotels and 20 of the 300-plus hospitals in Ghaziabad have fire NOCs.
“Last year, the fire department sent a report to GDA, urging the authority to take action against hotels and hospitals that had not applied for an NOC,” he said.
Sunil Kumar Singh, the chief fire officer of Ghaziabad, said that some hospitals and hotels have not been able to obtain the certificate due to their old buildings and inadequate fire-fighting infrastructure, while many others have not even applied for the same.
“A few months back, the fire department had asked several hotels in the district to apply for the NOC but they did not bother,” the officer said.
“The department has been carrying out inspections in hospitals, hotels and housing societies for the past one month. We are surprised to find that only a few hospitals and hotels have the NOCs. The remaining establishments are running without the mandatory certificates,” Singh further said.
According to the fire department, there are 103 factories in the district that have the fire NOC, while over thousands of factories are running without any fire document or equipment. There are an estimated 5,000 factories in Ghaziabad. Around 800 come under the ‘dangerous’ category due to their high-voltage machines while around 15,000 factories are operating out of houses.
A fire official said that in the past two years, not a single factory or industry has applied for the fire NOC.
In the first three months of 2021 (January to March), as many as 211 cases of fire have been reported in the district, in which seven people lost their lives, as against 178 cases during the same period in 2018, in which five people died.
Around 25% of fires are caused by garbage burning, while others can be attributed to short-circuits, gas leakage and other reasons, officials said.
“In Ghaziabad, 35% of the fires occurred due to short-circuits only,” Singh said.