Fire at Mumbai's Anik depot guts 10 BEST buses and damages two more

A fire at the Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport undertaking's Anik depot in Sion on Monday evening destroyed 10 parked CNG buses and damaged two more. No one was injured. The Mumbai Fire Brigade put the blaze out after smoke from the yard was visible across the eastern suburbs. Officials said the cause was not yet fixed.

The 12 buses were wet-lease midi vehicles run by a private contractor, not buses BEST owns outright. A senior official investigating the fire told the Times of India he suspected combustible material near a bus had caught from a spark from an outside source. The fire then melted gas pipes, the official said, and the leak made the blaze larger. Nine of the buses were new and three were already in service, sources told the paper. A BEST committee member said depot staff did not react promptly. That complaint is a charge about the first minutes, not a finding.

The fleet context is the part a commuter will feel. BEST is running about 2,800 buses, a figure officials describe as an all-time low for a city of this size. Losing 10 vehicles, and having two more out for repair, does not empty a route by itself. It lands on a roster that already cancels trips. This was the eighth fire involving BEST buses since 3 May. A pattern of eight in five months is a maintenance and fuel-system question, not a one-yard accident. CNG midi buses on wet lease add a contractor's workshop to that question. BEST owns the depot. The contractor owns, or finances, the vehicles. The pipe that melted sits on the contractor's bus, in a yard BEST controls.

Wet lease is the model BEST has used to put buses on the road without buying them. A private firm supplies the vehicle and often the driver. BEST supplies the route, the fare and the depot slot. When a leased bus burns, the replacement is a claim on the contract, not a line in BEST's capital budget. Riders do not see that distinction at the stop. They see a missing departure. Anik, in the eastern dock belt, feeds routes into Sion, Chembur and the highway toward Navi Mumbai. A yard fire in the evening peak, even with no injuries, takes those vehicles off Tuesday's sheet.

CNG has been BEST's answer to diesel emissions for two decades. The safety record of the tanks depends on inspection of pipes, relief valves and the clearance around parked buses. A suspected external spark setting material alight, then a melted pipe feeding the fire, is a sequence that points at housekeeping in the yard as much as at the bus. The official's account is a suspicion while the probe runs. It is specific enough to check: what was stored beside the bus, who last inspected the gas lines, and why eight fires since May have not produced a published failure report.

No injury is the fact that keeps this off the disaster page. The countable loss is 10 buses destroyed, two damaged, a fleet near 2,800, and an eighth fire in five months. The inquiry has to say whether the contractor's vehicles met the depot's parking rules, and whether BEST's own staff had a drill that failed in the first minutes, as the committee member alleged. Until that report, the eastern suburbs have a burnt row of midi buses and a roster that was already short.