By Sandeep Verma 
Ghaziabad, April 29: It was a regular Wednesday morning in Indirapuram. People were getting ready for work, kids were being packed off to school, someone was probably arguing about the TV remote. And then the smoke started.
By the time most residents of Gaur Green Avenue in Abhay Khand realised something was seriously wrong, the ninth floor of D Tower was already on fire. Not a small fire. Not something the building’s extinguisher could handle. A proper, raging fire that was eating through one flat and eyeing the next.
Within the hour, the smoke was so thick and so high that people driving on the Delhi-Meerut Expressway were pulling over to film it. That is how bad it got, that fast.
It Started on the Ninth Floor
Nobody knows exactly what set it off. A resident named Rohit, who was at the site when reporters arrived, told PTI he suspected something to do with electricity. “Around 10-12 flats are gutted,” he said. “Maybe there was some light issue. I do not have full information.”
Fair enough. In the middle of a building fire, nobody has full information. You just run.
The fire broke out sometime around 9 in the morning. In a 13-floor building, the 9th floor is not the top, but it is high enough that getting water up there is already a challenge. High enough that when something goes wrong, the floors above you are suddenly very far from the ground.
And this fire did not stay on the 9th floor. It spread. Flat to flat, floor to floor, the way fires do when nothing stops them early enough. By the time Ghaziabad’s Chief Fire Officer Rahul Pal got his teams on scene, eight flats had already been taken by the blaze. Roughly seven floors of the tower had been touched in some way.
Running Down Smoke-Filled Stairs
Think about what that morning looked like from inside the building. You are on the 12th floor. You smell something. Then you see the smoke coming under the door. You have maybe three minutes to decide what to grab before the corridor becomes unbreathable.
Sunil, who actually lives on that 12th floor, did exactly what any parent would do. He grabbed his kids and his family and got out. He did not say much more than that to reporters. He did not have to.
The society’s own staff deserves real credit here. They started moving people out before the fire department even showed up. Floor by floor, knocking on doors, getting families into the stairwells and down to the open ground below. That kind of fast thinking, done without any official order, almost certainly kept this from turning into something far worse.
Two senior citizens had to be physically pulled out from inside their flats. They could not get out on their own. Rescue teams got to them in time. As of mid-morning Wednesday, no deaths had been reported. Given that nearly a dozen flats burned, that is not a small thing.
Twenty Fire Trucks and Still Not Enough
More than 20 fire tenders came to the site. Which sounds like a lot, until you understand the problem. Indian fire trucks are mostly built to fight fires at ground level or in low buildings. Getting water to the 9th floor of a high-rise with enough force to actually fight a fire is a completely different situation. The pressure drops. The reach falls short. And the clock keeps ticking.
The UP Fire Service did bring hydraulic equipment to try and reach the upper floors. But even that ran into trouble with access. A hydraulic platform eventually had to be called in from Noida because Ghaziabad’s own equipment was not sufficient.
Two and a half hours into the operation, the fire was still going. Two and a half hours is a long time to watch your home burn.
Ajit Anjum, a well-known television journalist who actually lives in the same society, posted a video from inside while it was happening. He noted, quite pointedly, that more than 35 minutes had passed since the fire started and there was still no sign of the fire service or the police at the gate. That post spread fast online. Whether the delay was as bad as it looked, or whether traffic and distance stretched the response time, is something the investigation will need to answer. The question itself is completely valid.
The Chief Minister Took Notice Of Gaur Green Avenue Fire Incident
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath stepped in during the morning and directed district officials and the fire department to get to the scene and push hard on rescue operations. A detailed report has been asked for from the Ghaziabad district administration, covering how the fire started, how far it spread, and whether the building’s fire safety systems were up to the mark.
That last part is where things could get uncomfortable. Because if the answer is no, which it very well might be, then the question becomes why not, and who signed off on it.
Ghaziabad Has Been Through This Before
Here is something that should make every resident of Indirapuram sit up. This is not the first fire in the area this year. Not even close.
Just a few days ago, a fire broke out inside a flat on the 22nd floor of Ajnara Green Society, also in Ghaziabad. Before that, more than 250 small homes in Kanawani village, right inside Indirapuram, burned to the ground when LPG cylinders started exploding one after another. And in Lucknow’s Vikas Nagar, a fire earlier this year killed somewhere between 10 and 15 children and destroyed over 300 homes.
Uttar Pradesh has had a rough year for fires. Summer makes it worse, it always does. When temperatures cross 40 degrees and every air conditioner in every flat is running all day and all night, the electrical load on old wiring becomes enormous. Something has to give eventually.
But that is only part of the story. The bigger part is what was or was not built into these towers in the first place. The housing boom that built most of NCR’s high-rises happened fast. Builders were racing to finish projects and sell flats. Fire safety, things like working sprinkler systems, smoke detectors on every floor, proper emergency exits, regular maintenance of firefighting equipment, these were the things that got trimmed when the budget got tight. The National Building Code requires all of it for buildings above a certain height. What actually exists inside many of these towers is a different story entirely.
What Happens Now
The investigation is open. The fire department and police are both looking into it. But realistically, the cause will take time to establish because right now everyone’s priority is still putting the fire out and accounting for every resident.
For the families whose flats burned this morning, none of that process means very much right now. They are standing outside their building with whatever they carried out, watching smoke still rising from the floors above. Some of them have lost everything inside. The investigation report, when it comes, will not give any of that back.
For everyone else in Gaur Green Avenue, and honestly for everyone living in the hundreds of similar towers across Indirapuram, Vaishali, Raj Nagar Extension, and the rest of the NCR satellite belt, Wednesday is a moment to ask some simple but uncomfortable questions. Does your building have working smoke alarms? Do you know where the nearest fire exit is? When was the last time the fire safety equipment in your society was actually checked by someone who knows what they are doing?
Most people do not know the answers. Most buildings, if you pushed hard enough, would not have great answers either.
A fire visible from a highway, in a city that has seen fire after fire this year, should not have to be the thing that starts that conversation. But here we are.
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Arun Upadhayay