In a macabre incident first of its kind which rocked the entire city, six firemen of the Thane Municipal fire services died due to suffocation in a lift in a housing complex in the early hours of Sunday.
The firemen were among the team who had gone to attend to a call in the Tarangam housing complex of Vartak Nagar locality to put out the fire, police said.
It was around 11.30 the firemen received a call that there was a fire in the house of one Kulkarni in the 14th floor of Punarvasu building.
The firemen rushed and put out the fire and returned only to be called once again at about 3.30 am being the repeat call.
In a bid to put out the fire the firemen took the lift in the building and as luck would have it the lift failed and stood in between and all the six firemen in the lift suffocated to death and all efforts to rescue them failed.
The names of the dead firemen were given as P J Kale, S Thanekar, K G Patil, S K Shinde, S R Jamadar and G C Singh.
The exact cause of the fire is still not known, police said.
The fire was a small one but the smoke emanating from the fire claimed the lives of the firemen, who were proceeding to the 14th floor. PTI
