It probably is unfair to lay the blame at KESC’s door – just because we finally decided to service our generator, who’s to say we wouldn’t have used it even after a 70 hour blackout? Who’s to say that filling the generator with petrol, which we’ve done hundreds of times over the past year, would still have been a disaster any other time? Who’s to say, after all, that it wasn’t the lack of sleep for three days, the extreme heat and the general frustration we were feeling that caused such pain?
No, this would probably have happened in any case. The generator was off, we’d just tested it before getting a 12-liter can of petrol to fill it. My husband, standing out in the balcony behind the kitchen, holding the petrol can, still can’t figure out why flames suddenly shot out of the generator. I think it was the pilot light in the water heater a few feet away – fumes from the petrol travelling, maybe? I was just inside the balcony door when the flames erupted. In the blink of an eye, the jerry can in my husband’s hand exploded, and the flames swept towards me. All I could hear was him screaming (afterwards, in a saner moment, he told me he was yelling at me to get back, but I don’t remember that).
The flames licked my feet, and I panicked. He was caught behind the fire, and I searched desperately for a source of water to douse the heat. I yelled at my husband, and he came running through the flames, both legs still flaming, until he reached carpet and stamped out the flames. By that time, the kitchen was ablaze. I flung open the front door and yelled at the top of my lungs, and my employee, still waiting at the elevator bank, came rushing back in. We have 19-liter water cans for drinking and he picked one up and flung it into the kitchen. My husband and I were hanging over the balustrade, 9 floors up, yelling ‘Fire!’
3 adult cats, and a tub with three kittens were still in the apartment, so we went back in. Black smoke was moving through so quickly that finding them seemed impossible. I grabbed a towel, dropped it in the sink and pushed it under an open tap and used it to cover the kitten’s tub; carried them out the front door and ran back in to help in the search of the cats. We have a big french window at the other end of the apartment, and I needed to get the smoke out, but fumbled, couldn’t get the blinds open, and the smoke was filling up the room fast. I finally managed to pull it open and my husband, panicking because we could no longer see anything, started yelling for me. The cats had found the safest spot in the apartment, under the bed in the back, low to ground, where the smoke was still clear, and they fought and scratched in their own panic, but he got them out.
The men working downstairs kept their heads. They turned off gas and power to the entire block, raced up 9 stories (no power still – after 70 hours, the generators were dying) with a hose and went rushing into the flames. Management called the fire department, and we grabbed essentials where we could – phones, wallets, laptop (strange things we pick up), checkbooks (my husband also kept his head). His legs and face were an angry red where the fire had touched. Days later, we noticed the uneven eyelashes, the strips of skin that peeled off his eyelids, his lips, his nose, his brow. I had burnt all 5 toes of my left foot, and the agony was unbearable, but my husband is still peeling skin off his legs, both blistered and raw up to his knees. His right ankle still hurts, where the fire had taken hold. By the time the fire truck arrived, though, the fire was out.
My mother and sister arrived to take us across the street to the Aga Khan Urgent Care services. They gave my husband a pain killer, applied balm and medication to both of our wounds – but it took nearly two hours to bandage us up. Tetanus shots, antibiotics, and the quiet hum of the air conditioner, and both of us began to calm down.
When I had gone back to the apartment that same night, (July 21, 2009), water was still running in the sink where I had dampened the towel. The power and gas were off, the floor was slick from water from the hose, and the walls and ceilings were black from smoke damage.I found out later that windows had exploded outwards, falling nine floors onto the car park, but thankfully, noone had been hurt.
My sister and I had gathered essentials and travelled back to my mother’s place, where we soothed terrified cats out from under the cupboard. Now, it’s a distant memory. A month later and we’re back in the apartment. The black walls are painted, the charred kitchen cabinets replaced, the melted appliances thrown out. We need a new washing machine and the fridge had to get a face-lift. We’re still pulling out books and finding soot in odd places, but the overpowering smell of soot that was in my hair, my skin, my clothes, my papers, my curtains, my furniture for days after the fire – that seems to have gone.
We need a fire extinguisher for the apartment, but my nightmares are now different. We’re on the ninth floor. There’s one exit – the front door. If we’re ever trapped again in the apartment, our choices are burning in the fire, charring our lungs from the smoke, or jumping from the balcony and breaking every bone in our bodies. There are no zoning laws that decree fire safety for any of these multi-storey buildings. And while we’ve gotten off lightly, my husband and I (we’re sure it could have been, should have been a lot worse), how many others will suffer before we begin to value basic safety laws? How many deaths before we insist on fire escapes, earthquake proofing, flood warnings, and any other disaster we can think of? Just how backward are we?
In a burst of irony that day, when we finally drove away from the charred apartment block, a KESC truck pulled out from the substation next to the main gate (which KESC, over several calls made to their call center during the blackout, kept insisting was under water, though our road and building had been miraculously clear of water throughout the rainstorms), and the building lit up with lights in every apartment. Ours was a black gaping hole. I found out later that some minister’s/big shot/VIP needed a transformer, so they had simply taken out the transformer that fed our area, and had used it in the big shot’s area while they waited for a new one to be delivered to ours. Because of this, 4 apartment blocks in Clifton Block 2 had remained dark for 3 days.