A massive fire broke out in a cloth bazaar in the busy Broadway market in Ernakulam district of Kerala around 10 am on Monday. The shops which caught fire in the cloth bazaar were Bhadra Textiles and KC Textiles.
The Kerala Fire and Rescue Services was informed the very moment that shops caught fire. However, though the name of the commercial market is Broadway, the roads are very narrow and packed with vehicles. This led to an almost half-hour delay and fire vehicles could reach the spot only after 10.30 am. According to TV channel reports, the fire engines were also delayed as hundreds of people had gathered on Broadway as soon as they heard about the fire.
Once the fire engines reached, the traders and the locals present in the market also joined the Fire Force officials in dousing the fire.
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Being a weekday, most of the shops in the market were open and the initial response by the Fire Force was to vacate the people and materials from the nearby shops and to ensure that the fire from these textile shops did not spread to the nearby buildings. The cloth bazaar in the Broadway street is packed with buildings and people, and hence it was a challenge to ensure that the fire did not spread to other buildings. Making it even more difficult was the fact that the buildings that caught fire were cloth shops which meant that they can catch fire faster. But according to reports, no casualties have been reported so far.
According to a report by Asianet News, the traders in Broadway market said that the Bhadra Textiles building is many decades old and that all the clothes for sale are stored in the building itself.
Kochi City Police Commissioner S Surendran and Mayor Soumini Jain arrived at the location to supervise the operations by more than 10 Fire Force teams, and they said that if the need arose, they will bring the Fire Force teams from the CIAL and the Cochin Shipyard.