With fire incidents still making headlines across Delhi-NCR on a day-to-day basis, living in a high rise building has certainly made the residents face anxiety thinking about the eventually of getting stuck in the situation of a fire incident. This is probably why a recent Instagram reel by Gurugram-based content creator Prranav Vashistha (@the_milennialfather) went viral recently. Clocking a massive 28 million views, the video shows a new equipment that enables fire escape, when mounted in the balcony or terrace of a residential building. Equipped with a safety harness and a specialised rope (10m to 99m), it lets a person strap in and descend safely from an upper floor when the need to escape arises.
. A Reel showing a woman descending from her fourth-floor home using a harness from a safety kit (see above) has clocked 28M views and 904K likes on Instagram. For Prranav, bringing this tech home was all about family’s peace of mind. “Every day, there is news of some or the other fire incident, and living on the fourth floor does make me feel apprehensive almost all the time,” he says, adding, “My wife is a pilot, and in the aviation sector we see fire safety drills as a crucial part of the job. She thus encouraged me to think about having something at home that would allow our family to escape safely in case of an emergency. That’s when we came across a product on Instagram, and decided to get it installed. But, before buying it we went through several demonstration videos and safety tests to satisfy ourselves that it was reliable. We even had my wife, myself, our nanny, and everyone take a demonstration by descending from the balcony of our house one by one; test it out.”
What led to the invention of this equipment was the fire incident in Dwarka, last year. “It was right in front of my eyes that I saw two little kids jump from the balcony of the high-rise in Dwarka, due to a fire at their home. That left me hurt and in shock,” says Saurabh Sharma, creator of Safe Sky Drop, adding, “I realised how residences must have some sort of a safety net that can be used by anyone, even untrained individuals, and is easy to use as an exit plan in case of fire.”
Digging deeper, Saurabh looked into the National Building Code (NBC) and fire statistics, only to find some pretty terrifying realities. “A lot of casualties in fire cases at residences are happening inside the house where all the NBC norms were followed. And, in 90% of the cases, the exit to get out of the house is the very thing that gets cut off in case of a fire, which could be because of multiple reasons. But the simple common ground for the casualties was that the residents could not make an exit well in time. So, such an equipment that
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