India: Fire spreads from projector room of cinema hall in Delhi

New Delhi, India

A cinema hall in India's Moti Nagar neighbourhood in West Delhi caught fire on Sunday afternoon. Reports suggest that as many as 67 people were present inside the hall at the time of the incident. Fortunately, no one suffered any sort of injury and everyone was safely evacuated.

Reports citing fire officials said that the incident took place at Fun Cinema auditorium number 3 during the screening of the Hollywood film Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. The officials said that the fire appeared to have started in the projection room. The auditorium, according to them, is situated on the third floor of the structure.

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Director of Delhi Fire Services Atul Garg said that a call about the fire was received at around 1.12 pm. “Since it was the question of fire in a cinema hall, we rushed seven fire tenders to the spot,” said Garg.

Senior fire officer B Prakash said it took around two minutes for the fire tenders to get to the cinema. “By the time we reached there, the cinema staffers had begun rescuing the audience members,” said Prakash. “The fire was found to be in the projector room, an isolated cabin cramped for space and dark and filled with machines, as is common in all projector rooms.”

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The auditorium hall has a seating capacity of 200 people, said a sub-officer of Moti Nagar fire station Praveen Kumar. “The fire seemed to be in the split AC in the projector room. There was so much smoke that we couldn’t have gone into the auditorium and searched for anyone trapped inside without breathing apparatus,” he said.

It is important to note that the exact cause of the fire is yet to be ascertained. In about six to seven minutes the fire was doused, said Prakash. 

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“One team was involved in extinguishing the fire. The other team focused on rescuing the audience members who were all brought out through the emergency door after the fire alarm was triggered,” he said.

Although the auditorium soon got filled with smoke, Prakash said that there was no stampede-like situation. Fire authorities said that the occupants of the other two auditoriums were also evacuated simultaneously for safety reasons. However, they were unable to immediately disclose how many people were in each auditorium.

“The cinema staffers used their available smoke exhaust machines to remove the smoke, a process that took over an hour. In the meantime, we searched the hall to see if everyone had vacated it and if anyone had fallen unconscious inside,” said Prakash. The firefighters had to use breathing apparatus sets to go about the search operation in the smoke-filled hall, he said adding, “the public and the cinema staff cooperated with us to make it easy for us."