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Friday, 16 July , 2004, 12:13
Kumbakonam (Tamil Nadu): In a tragic incident, over 80 girl students of a private school and some teachers were charred to death and over 30 received grievous burns when a fire tore through their school at Kumbakonam in Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu on Friday.
While most of the children died on-the-spot and were charred beyond recognition, some others succumbed to injuries in the hospital.
The fire, which is believed to have started from the kitchen when the noon meal for nursery children was being prepared, soon spread to a row of thatched roof classrooms where students from class one to class five were present, police and eyewitnesses said.
Five class rooms on the third floor of the Krishna Middle school were gutted in the fire that broke out at 11 am. Around 900 students were present in the complex housing primary, middle and high schools.
While the high school and primary school students escaped on noticing the fire, the primary school children got trapped as the thatched roof collapsed on them making their movement difficult. Some teachers who tried to rescue the children also died.
The injured were admitted to government and some private hospitals where their condition was stated to be serious.
District Collector J Radhakrishnan, who was on the spot supervising the rescue and relief operations, told PTI that the fire completely destroyed five classrooms. Some of the victims also died of suffocation as the exit passage was narrow, he said.
Fire service personnel, with the help of cranes, broke open the walls to gain entry into the school but it was too late and the children were charred beyond recognition.
Radhakrishnan described the scene as heart-rendering and said that preliminary investigation suggested that the fire began from the kitchen but its exact cause was being probed.
As the news of the fire spread, parents and relatives of the children rushed to the school to look for their wards.
Crying and sobbing parents anxiously watched as the charred bodies were extricated from the debris. Similar scenes were witnessed at the hospitals where parents searched for their loved ones among the injured.
Fire tenders from Kumbakonam and neighbouring towns battled the flames for nearly two hours.
The incident is the second major fire mishap in the state this year after the inferno in a marriage hall in Srirangam, near Tiruchirappalli, in which 59 people were charred to death in January.