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Around 10 pm on Monday, 12 September, K Keshavan, 27, woke up to someone pounding on his hotel room door. He was in room number 405 of Ruby Luxury Hotel, Secunderabad where a massive fire had broken out around 9.30 pm.
As he opened the door, he could see another panicked guest – the occupant of room number 406 – who asked him to break open the hotel room window.
"Till I heard the knock on the door, I was not aware that there was a fire raging nearby. But when I opened the door, I saw thick smoke in the hallway," Keshavan told The Quint. What happened next was a heroic decision that saved his life.
The fire accident has claimed the lives of eight persons, Hyderabad North Zone DCP Chandana Deepti told The Quint.
Keshavan said that the two of them broke open his room window within two minutes. "Smoke was already entering my room and I was finding it difficult to breathe. But we could get down to a parapet through the window which we broke open," he said.
The same was the plight of six others who have now lodged a police complaint against the hotel authorities, who according to Hyderabad Police did not have permission to run an electronic vehicle charging unit in the basement.
Manmohan Khanna, a hotel guest who escaped by climbing down from the fourth floor of the building, has given a statement to Market Police Station, Secunderabad, stating that he heard the "room boys and hotel staff screaming." As per the FIR, he had seen flames rising from the first floor. Khanna and three others climbed to the fifth floor terrace of the building.
According to a Hyderabad Police source, of the eight persons who succumbed to injuries, four have been identified as residents of Chennai, Mumbai, Calcutta, and Gurugram. One was from Visakhapatnam. All five were men.
Another person, a resident of Bengaluru, is admitted in a private hospital in Hyderabad and is believed to be in critical condition. Six other injured persons are admitted in three different hospitals in the city.
A policeman, Rakesh, told mediapersons gathered at the spot, "When I entered the building, the smoke was so thick that it was difficult to see the person standing just beside you. I could rescue four persons from the spot."
Keshavan told The Quint, "I did not know that there were electronic bikes parked in the cellar. I had stayed at the hotel a year ago when I was in Hyderabad for business. I opted for the same hotel when I came this time too."
Regional Fire Officer V Papaiah told The Quint that the owners of the commercial building had not obtained a No Objection Certificate (NOC) from the fire safety department.
However, the building had some of the firefighting equipment mandated by the fire safety department. There were hose reels, smoke alarms, and sprinklers in the building.
If the guests and the staff had escaped to the terrace of the building, lives could have been saved, the regional officer said. In the basement, where the fire broke out, water sprinklers had turned on. This created thick smoke.
Many hotel guests must have been caught unaware when the smoke suddenly rose, DCP Chandana Deepti told The Quint. "People may not have noticed the smoke at first. The fire could be contained, but those trapped had inhaled too much smoke," Deepti said.
The case is under investigation, he added. As per the fire safety norms, the building should also have had one lakh litre of water in the sump for dousing flames. An additional 10,000 litre of water should have been stored on the terrace.
However, a lack of ventilation turned out to be fatal for most guests in the building, regional fire officer Papaiah said. "Had there been enough vents for the smoke to escape, then fatalities could have been averted," he said.
There were 28 rooms for guests in the hotel of which 25 were occupied.
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