EDITORIAL - Justice for Ozone victims

The scars may never heal for the survivors of the fire that destroyed the Ozone Disco. Five years ago today, fire broke out in the disc jockey’s booth of the disco in Quezon City. The disco’s fire extinguishers didn’t work and there were no water sprinklers. There was also no fire exit. This might have posed no problem if there had been a sparse crowd in the disco, which was supposed to hold only 35 people. On that fateful night, however, the disco was crammed with 350 customers, most of them young people celebrating their graduation, in addition to 40 employees.

When warnings of a fire finally got through the music and haze, the crowd rushed to the only way in or out of the disco. A few people managed to get out, but security guards quickly locked the door from the outside. An employee later testified that this was in accordance with the owners’ instructions for dealing with commotions at the disco. Behind the locked door, which swung only inward, there was a stampede, sealing the fate of those trapped inside. By the time the fire was put out nearly three hours later, 162 people were dead, most of them charred beyond recognition. Nearly a hundred others suffered serious burns and other injuries.

Two days before the fifth anniversary of the tragedy, the victims finally got justice. The Quezon City Regional Trial Court sentenced two of the disco’s owners to four years in prison and ordered each of them to pay the victims more than P25 million. A number of the survivors and relatives of the fatalities deemed the sentence too light, but it’s an unusual triumph to see negligent owners being convicted at all for a case like the Ozone tragedy.

Fire and building safety regulations are routinely ignored by many building owners in the country. Even a perfunctory look at some of the buildings will tell you that these are firetraps. There are no fire exits, windows are barred, walls and ceilings are tinderboxes just waiting for a lighted match to set them on fire. Each March the nation observes Fire Prevention Month with hardly any progress in making negligent building owners comply with fire safety standards. Now perhaps the conviction of Ozone owners Hermilo Ocampo and Ramon Ng will force others of their kind to put public safety ahead of the profit motive.