No inspection control was carried out at the Pulse nightclub by a fire protection inspector, expert witness Viktorija Budimovska Sekulovska testified at Wednesday’s continuation of the trial for the devastating fire in a nightclub in Kochani.
The hearing resumed with cross-examination by the defense to the experts. Answering the questions, Budimovska Sekulovska said that the expert examination determined that only one evacuation plan was displayed inside the building.
The main entrance-exit door was not fireproof.
“Everything that belongs to a fire door, meaning a panic handle and a braking system in the open position and the fire resistance of the door itself, is not met on that door,” said the expert.
Another expert witness that testified was Marijana Lazarevska, a construction expert in Goran Markovski’s team from the Faculty of Civil Engineering, who in a previous statement made a detailed elaboration of all the work performed in the critical facility, in function of its repurposing.
“Although it was reiterated that it is not ours to determine the cause of the fire, I can share my personal opinion in this regard, that we assessed the initial source of the fire to be the sprinklers. However, the possibility of something catching fire in this particular case, in this particular facility, belongs to the sponge. So, here we have a direct connection,” said the expert witness in the courtroom.
According to Lazarevska, it’s something that helps the fire to ignite first, then burn and spread.
“Fire is a disaster that is included in our calculations, design and analysis. Fire is a disaster that we cannot predict when it will happen, for what reasons it will happen, but when designing, we work with the treatment that there is certainly a fire in the building. We do not delve into the cause, we cannot influence the causes, at least not always. That is why my comment is in that context – that we design the building to be safe in fire conditions, just as it should be safe in earthquake conditions, etc.,” said Lazarevska.
Everything in our expert report, Lazarevska added, is not based on one isolated document, but on the entire documentation.
