An “accidental” fire gutted 17 air-conditioned low-floor buses of the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) at one of its depots in South Delhi early on Thursday morning.
The incident sent officials scurrying to salvage as many vehicles as they possibly could before fire tenders arrived.
The Delhi Fire Services (DFS) said 10 tenders were despatched to the Ambedkar Terminal near Khanpur as soon as they received word about the incident around 3.20 a.m., a good 20 minutes after the said vehicles, which were supposedly queued up for refuelling, got engulfed by flames.
The fire-fighting operation took nearly two hours.
According to the DTC, which has constituted a fact-finding committee to look into the incident, the buses were merely parked in the yard at the facility and “timely action” on the part of its officials allowed them to save at least three vehicles from the midst of flames and many more from sustaining similar damage.
“As soon as the fire was noticed, the staff rushed towards the incident site to defuse the fire by using fire extinguishers.
The drivers who were available in the rest room removed 70 buses from the depot yard and parked them on the main road outside,” the DTC said in a statement.
In the meantime, the statement said, a police control room van stationed nearby alerted the DFS control room for assistance. The fire was brought under control by 5.30 a.m.
On whether the incident will affect bus services on routes the terminal caters to, DTC chairman-cum-CMD Debashree Mukherjee said: “We are pooling in available resources from other depots to ensure that services are not affected,” Ms. Mukherjee told The Hindu .
Meanwhile, the DTC fact-finding committee has also been asked to suggest measures to prevent re-occurrence of the incident, officials added.
