Part One
DAVAO CITY—Christmastime wasn’t the only thing in the air last December 23.
It was two days before Christmas, and vehicles crawled on roads at the southern part of the city, where one of the most frequented shopping malls was supposed to open one hour earlier to accommodate the holiday rush.
Up in the sky billowed black smoke, a throbbing funnel-shaped emission jutting to the sky from the left side of the New City Commercial Center (NCCC) shopping mall. It was about 9:30 in the morning.
Handheld devices chirped left and right from pedestrians and rubberneckers on Ma-a Road. Initial messages noted there was a fire in the mall, but where it was raging was anybody’s guess. Later on, messages showed how the fire spread.
Some shoppers from uptown detoured to the San Rafael Bridge hoping to avoid getting entangled in the traffic jam building up and still get to the mall before the expected shopping rush at late morning reach its peak.
Along the way, though, motorists would be greeted by another face of disaster that occurred a night earlier: the impact of a storm. Residents along the riverside slept on pavements, their furniture, appliances, chairs and tables, draped with wet clothing, leaning beside warehouses and shuttered stores.
Some other residents appeared to have just emerged from their homes when the flood subsided. Near the riverbanks, a long blanket of mud indicated a worse nightmare forresidents, with water marks in houses and posts showing how high floodwater reached: above houses with a second floor. These people were mute survivors of the wrath of Typhoon Vinta ( international code name Tembin), one of the last typhoons to hit the country but which made another queer landfall at the eastern Mindanao, swathing inland.
But, as early-morning shoppers would soon realize, the shopping mall fire has turned more serious than just being dismissed as one of those simple fires in big businesses that get easily put out.
Reaching the main highways, they were soon to be waived by police, who have set up road blocks going to the NCCC Mall.
The smoke billowing out from the shopping center had more volume and has become blacker.
We thought it was manageable
MANY of the more than 300 call-center agents, staff and their supervisors that time at the US digital research company Survey Sampling International (SSI) thought the fire inside the mall was manageable.
It took some more minutes before the SSI agents would notice something sinister at the third floor of the mall was already creeping toward them at the fourth floor.
“To my right I noticed some white smoke came out from the AC [air-conditioner],” Sheila, 21, said. She said she was at that time sitting on her cubicle with fellow staff grouped in a team of about 60 to 70 agents. The team was called a “wire.”
Sheila, who requested anonymity, said in a blink of an eye, the smoke that came out the AC became black.
Something that SSI employee Bai Maylen Latip, 22, also noticed. She began panicking. I felt panic from the other wires because they were running to and from anywhere the sound-proofed working area, Sheila added.
Latip told the BusinessMirror she didn’t notice the panic “because I panicked too.”
“I also asked out loud what should we do and what was happening,” she said. “In my mind, I was already thinking I would be dead soon.” But Sheila said she was able to keep her cool, the way she had been in many instances.
“I think the fire is manageable,” she said aloud.
Smoke from exits
THINKING the fire was manageable may have been the reason many of SSI agents and workers sought refuge at the narrow lockers and the rest room, and not the fire exit.
“When someone opened the fire exit, thick black smoke came out at us,” Sheila said. “Someone shouted to try to go the elevator.” We were relieved the elevator was still running, according to Latip. To our horror, the same thick black smoke came out, she added.
A hallway connected the employees’ working area to where their lockers are located. To get to and fro, they would pass by a lobby.
No one thought of the lobby, Sheila said, probably because the space was commonly used as a holding area for SSI applicants. The lobby, however, was shut off from the mall’s winding stair case with a thick glass.
“We were just like being tossed back and forth,” she said.
Many soon went to the lockers and the rest room because these were one of the remaining spaces the smoke hasn’t reached.
Zero visibility
NO one knew who was in charge.
“I just followed what the guy ahead of me was saying, relying on him that he was repeating what the others leading them were also saying,” Sheila said.
But Latip said she would not know if someone was really leading them or not.
“I clung close to the shoulder of the next guy in front of me, tight enough to seek comfort and assurance,” she said. “There was zero visibility.”
Latip could not describe how the smoke was or the heat. “I just kept on shouting every now and then,” she said adding she used her jacket to cover her face.
Sheila said the smoke smelled “terrible, not the smoke that we experience when we cook rice using wood.”
She used a shawl she retrieved from her locker to cover her face and eyes.
The emergency lamps had been popping out with the heat. Each pop would be followed by shouting all around as it got darker.
Soon, Sheila found herself climbing down a stair, onto the ground floor and outside.
“That’s when I really felt that I was safe,” she said.
Trapped
LATIP, Sheila and the other workers who were able to get out from their office at the fourth floor of the NCCC mall crossed the street. They looked up and saw the mall spewing smoke from every hole it tried to escaped from: open windows, viaducts, etc. It has yet to dawn on them they were the few survivors.
“We were there outside, refreshing our thoughts of what we’ve been through, not knowing that there were still some of our friends there trapped,” Sheila said.
Latip said it was only a few minutes later that they realized some were yet to come out; “when the head counts began.”
That time was not a hectic day for the company, and some wires were either on their day off or were not in full force.
Survivors said there were about six or seven teams that were on duty that time, or between 360 to 420 persons at the SSI work station.
From her hometown on her day off in Panabo City, Efrel Ann Miras, 19, got wind of the incident shortly after the SSI chat group began the chatter on the fire.
“It feels horrible later in the day when the accounting of those who might have been up there began to filter in,” Miras said. “I felt like I want to be there to help.”
It was impossible. Mira is on a place separated by a 32-kilometers road congested by vehicles.
To be continued
Image credits: Manuel Cayon