The residents had to spend the time without electricity in muggy weather as power backup was also unavailable.
After the incident of fire at Regalia Heights, the residents were forced to live without power supply as long as eleven hours on Friday. The residents had to spend the time without electricity in muggy weather as power backup was also unavailable because of burning of electric cables.
The residents including elderly people and children faced a lot of inconvenience in the scorching summer heat. The power was cut off around 11.45 am when the fire happened and it was only reinstated by 10:45 pm.
“If the management could have done proper maintenance of electricity system, then such kind of situation would not have come,” residents said.
The cause of fire was spark in the wires of the electric shaft of the building on Friday. The spark happened just above the false ceiling of the shops in the basement. The presence of waste in the false ceiling and dilapidated state of the wires added to the mess and soon, they caught fire, whose flames went up to first floor of the tower.
Residents call for root cause analysis in aftermath of fire
The residents blamed that it is negligence on part of the developer. They also complained that even after paying money, the resident have to suffer half a day without electricity, courtesy poor maintenance by Shipra Estate Limited (SEL), the developer.
“Imagine, a high-rise resident, who has invested close to a crore of money to lead a comfortable life, had to spend half of the day without electricity,” a resident said.
The electromechanical maintenance of the society is looked after by the developer, residents told.
“Builder charges approximately 1.6 lakh from the tower in the name of maintenance of electromechanical system, fire system and submersible pumps,” claimed members of Regalia Heights Residents Association (RHRA).
“And this is excluding the maintenance charge which is collected by 135 shops operating in the basement. If it is added, it would amount to several lakhs,” they added.
Residents also said that the problem will keep cropping up if it is not addressed from its root. “The fire turned electric wires into ashes. The developer replaced those damaged wires with the new ones and the power got restored. This is just dealing an issue at its face value whereas the problem exists much deeper,” commented Kaushik Ghosh, a member of RHRA.
“You have installed costly equipments but if you can't spend a small amount on its maintenance, it would falter someday,” Ghosh added.
However, this is not the first time that residents of Regalia have faced utter apathy of SEL. “During the summers of 2018, an incident related to electricity had happened,” RHRA claimed.
“For five straight days, our building was on power backup after the transformer which supplied power to tower smouldered,” said GM Nigam, ex-president of the society.
Even after charging money in return of maintenance, SEL had put the onus of replacement of the transformer, which costs several lakhs, on the residents, they claimed. “We had to write to DM, whose intervention, compelled SEL to replace the transformer,” Nigam added.
City Spidey contacted SEL multiple times to get their version on the story but our repeated calls and messages went unanswered.
