Bomb at Forum Mall! No, it’s just a drill

Bomb at Forum Mall! No, it’s just a drill
TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Bangalore: Mall shoppers, commuters, pedestrians and neighbours of Forum Mall were in for a shock on Monday — a bomb blast. Within minutes after two blasts outside the mall, the emergency response team (ERT) of the mall jumped into action with help from the civil defence team and Home Guards.
While they took 10 minutes to evacuate around 4,000 customers, storekeepers and managers, fire tenders and ambulances rushed to the spot.
The shock wave spread like a wild fire as police control rooms, fire services, newspaper offices were flooded with calls. One of the callers to TOI, who was gasping for breath said: “There was bomb blast at Forum. Police are pulling people out. Please do something.’’ He was in for a big shock and so was the rest of the city!
It was mock drill after all. Vinod, head, mall operations said: “We do this quite regularly to check our preparedness in emergencies. Only this time we involved civil defence, fire department and ambulances. We held the mock drill between 10 am and 11 am and the whole operation and response time to attend to the emergencies was effective as everything went as planned.”
“While we had informed the store managers about the drill, the customers were, indeed, caught unawares,’’ he added.
The lifts and escalators stopped working as the ERT evacuated people without causing panic. On the other hand, traffic was affected on the ever-busy Hosur Road for over an hour as the police stopped vehicular movement.
Vehicles were piled up in major junctions, including Dairy Circle and Adugodi Junction.