The devastating fire that ravaged the Maharashtra Secretariat building on Thursday has caused 30 per cent damage to the structure.
The Maharashtra Chief Minister, Mr Prithviraj Chavan, on Friday said once the fire brigade completes its operations and declares it safe for inspection, State Government officials, along with architects and engineers, will carry out a safety audit.
The Secretariat building is spread over 5.17 lakh square feet, of which, 1.55 lakh square feet has been affected.
Depending on the audit report, the Government will take a view whether to use the first three floors and the annexe section for running the Secretariat or to discontinue use of the building altogether. Water used for dousing the fire has seeped into lower floors, damaging some offices. The CM was addressing journalists at the Legislative Assembly, which is now functioning as a temporary office for him and his ministerial colleagues.
The fire killed five people, of which, two are State Government employees and three victims were visitors. One person is critically injured and is still under intensive care in a hospital.
Government files
Mr Chavan said attempts would be made to recover data from the 2,000 computers, which have been destroyed in the fire. For reading hard disks, help would be sought from Nasscom, cyber cell of the police, and foreign data recovery experts.
“Since the work of digitising all the files in the Secretariat was underway, scanned data of 2.25 lakh files is with us safely. For recovering data from damaged paper files help would be taken from the Director of Archives,” he said.
Mr Chavan scotched rumours that files pertaining to the Adarsh housing scam had been destroyed in the fire. All the files relating to the scam are already with the CBI. So the fire will not affect CBI’s investigation, he said.
He added that Government departments would be housed in various State Government buildings spread all over the city. In GT Hospital in South Mumbai over one lakh square feet of space is readily available. However, there is a pending litigation in the courts. Efforts are underway to lift the court stay, he said.