Sixty-four fires on one Diwali night in Jammu are a warning that no fire brigade alone can answer. Prevention is a shared duty, and our carelessness becomes someone else’s loss.
The numbers from Diwali night should trouble every household and trader in Jammu. Fire and Emergency Services recorded 64 incidents across the region, 53 of them between 5 pm and 3 am, the hours of celebration and firecrackers. Jammu district alone saw 30. A five-storey commercial building at Pahari Mohalla was gutted. A medical store building at Shalimar and a hardware godown at Gangyal were damaged. The worst blaze tore through Warehouse Nehru Market, the city’s oldest wholesale hub, where stocks of edible oil fed the flames and around 15 shops were lost.
The traders’ anger is understandable. Warehouse Association President Deepak Gupta has accused the fire brigade of reaching the spot an hour and a half late, though the station is minutes away. The department says its tenders were rushed at once and that it was stretched thin by dozens of simultaneous calls. Both claims deserve a fair and transparent inquiry. If there was a delay, those responsible must answer for it. The government must also explain why a city of Jammu’s size has so few tenders that one busy night can overwhelm them.
But accountability cannot stop at the fire station gate. Fifty-three fires in ten hours did not start by accident. They started in crackers burst beside shuttered shops, in rockets that landed on rooftops stacked with cardboard, in wiring already overloaded by festive lights, in godowns where oil and grain were stored without a single working extinguisher. Each of these is a choice made by someone, and each choice put a neighbour’s property and life at risk.
Think of what happens when a fire breaks out in a congested market. The flames do not respect shop boundaries. A spark in one careless trader’s premises becomes a disaster for fifteen honest ones. The firefighters who reach the spot struggle through lanes blocked by encroachments and parked vehicles. The hydrants, where they exist, are often dry or buried. These are not failures of a department alone. They are failures of a community that treats safety as someone else’s job.
The state has its obligations. It must enforce fire safety norms in markets, inspect godowns, clear access routes, equip stations properly and staff them well. The Heaven Mail will keep pressing it on all of these. But no inspector can stand beside every shop on Diwali night. Traders’ associations must insist that members keep extinguishers and sand buckets, store inflammables safely and maintain their wiring. Residents must burst crackers only in open spaces, away from buildings, and keep water at hand. Parents must supervise children.
Diwali is a festival of light, not of smoke rising from a burnt market. Jammu has paid for one night of carelessness with the livelihoods of dozens of families. The lesson must not be allowed to burn out with the embers.
