At least four firefighters and a cameraman from a private television channel were injured on Tuesday when a large fire destroyed a clothing factory in the industrial area of New Karachi, according to police officers and rescue services.
Said said police senior police officer from the Central District, Zeeshan Shafiq Siddiqi Dawn.com That the factory building that originally captured fire collapsed, and four firefighters were injured as a result.
Rescue spokesman 1122, Hassaanul Haseb Khan, in a statement, said: “In addition to the four firefighters, a cameraman from a private television channel was also injured due to the collapse of the building.”
According to the SSP Siddiqi, the presence of Diesel drums aggravated the fire, which extended rapidly, wrapping two more industrial units in its surroundings.
The injured firefighters were taken to the Abbasi Shaheed hospital, while more checks were made at the Karachi Civil Hospital and the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center for any additional victim.
The police officer identified the four injured people as Ismail, 50, Owais, 35, Buland, 30, and Aslam, also 30 years old. “They are in a stable condition,” he added.
SSP Siddiqi and the Central District Commissioner were supervising the fire extinction operation.
Detailing the rescue operation, Haseb said that the firefighters “immediately” responded after receiving information about the fire. A fire and rescue team, an ambulance and five fire tenders arrived at the scene and helped control the fire.
The 1122 rescue said the immediate response helped them control the fire, but the building collapsed due to the impact of the fire.
Fire frequently explodes in buildings in Pakistan due to a combination of poor infrastructure, weak application of generalized safety and negligence regulations. Many structures lack adequate fire exits, alarms and emergency protocols, while defective and overloaded energy systems increase the risk of electrical short circuits.
According to city planners and engineers, 70 percent of residential, commercial and industrial buildings in Karachi lacked an adequate fire security system. Citing official data from the city’s fire department, the president of the Fire Protection Association, Kunwar Waseem, said the city witnessed almost 3,000 incidents of this type in 2024.
At the end of August, at least six people died in a fire that exploded after a massive explosion inside a warehouse in a densely populated area near the Karachi Taj medical complex.
At the beginning of that month, a mass fire in a factory in the Karachi export processing zone (Kepz) near Landhi wounded eight people and damaged at least three other factories.
