New Delhi: In the early hours of 31 May 2016, a fire broke out in a shed at the Central Ammunition Depot in Pulgaon, near Wardha in Maharashtra. The shed held sensitive ammunition. The depot’s firefighters did what they were trained to do: they ran towards it.
By the time the blaze was confined to that one shed, 16 people were dead. Two were Army officers and one was a jawan. The other 13 were civilian firefighting staff, the depot’s own fire crew. Six more of their colleagues were injured.
Ten years on, that toll still captures the oldest rule of firefighting: someone has to go in first. Someone has to get close enough to find the seat of the fire, judge whether the structure will hold and decide where the water should land. In a house fire, that risk is serious. In an ammunition store, a fuel farm or a refinery, it can kill before anyone has time to react.
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The problem is not a shortage of courage. It is heat, smoke and the threat of a second blast. Radiant heat stops crews well short of where they need to be. Smoke hides the flames. And at sites packed with explosives or hydrocarbons, one fire can set off another. The explosions at Pulgaon that night shook houses in the surrounding villages.
A new generation of firefighting robots is built to close that gap. They are not designed to replace crews, but to change the order in which crews go in.
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