“The store was suffocatingly full. You couldn’t walk to your company”
The testimony of a girl who experienced hell in a bar in… is shocking Pagrati, when Sunday afternoon the shop went up in flames from a cake sparkler.
“It’s not that people panicked, people couldn’t breathe. She was drowning, there was a fire, we would burn like mice”, said the young woman who had gone to have fun with her group and explained:
“We could have been burned alive and nobody has said anything about the fact that there was no way out, we all got out of a very small door.”
As the 25-year-old patron of the bar complains on the “Live News” show, there was no emergency exit in the store and safety rules were not followed as the bar was suffocatingly full as can be seen in the video document.
“How does the state protect its citizens?”
“It’s not possible to have bars where people can’t go out. Okay they arrested the waiter this thing can happen to anyone. But the bar? How does the state protect its citizens?”, he asked.
The bar in Pagrati had become popular and loved by the youth for the parties it held every Sunday evening, which as can be seen in videos from similar parties some time ago, was inseparable, with people packed and some even climbing onto the bar to have fun.
“We had practically reserved a table for 20 people, but the store, imagine, had crowded us so much. When I entered the store I say: “well, is it possible?”. We had booked a table for 20 people and they put us in 2 tables next to each other and we were on top of each other. The shop was suffocatingly full. You couldn’t walk to your company,” said a patron of the store.
The pictures speak for themselves as to whether the shop was overcrowded.
As can be seen in the video, the waiter is unable to pass through the crowd and is forced to lift up the cake with the sparkler to pass.
The Christmas tree hanging from the ceiling immediately burst into flames and the flames spread like lightning despite the immediate intervention of the staff with the fire extinguisher as reported by the patron.
“This one flared up, fell down, they were screaming then after it fell down they put it out, relatively quickly, but this one couldn’t be put out with a fire extinguisher. It was still burning and at that moment I turned around, found a table and poured juice on a napkin and put it on my face so I could breathe. Then all the people tried to go back because the fire lit up in other places and we were like mice”.
“We went outside and heard something like small explosions”
“You couldn’t see, you couldn’t see where you were going because it was so smoky so you couldn’t tell where you were in the bar. If you didn’t know the bar you couldn’t go out. Other friends of mine used to tell me that we would touch the bar and by touching it we would go out. There was too much smoke, you couldn’t see anything. Especially as soon as the fire extinguisher fell then the atmosphere became much more cloudy. The fire continued to burn while we were going out and when we got out we heard something like small explosions.”
“Someone from the bar after a few seconds got a fire extinguisher and put it out but this thing didn’t go out completely, it kept burning and then sparks were thrown elsewhere. So where you said calm down and ok it went out we will go out, then it caught fire again”.
It’s the moment a man tries to break the glass of the bar with kicks to free the people.
“There was terrible smoke and you couldn’t breathe because of it and we broke the windows after a lot of effort. It’s not like there was a panic and everyone ran and broke the windows in panic, no, we were going to die in there. It wasn’t panic. The children are in shock. Most of the children couldn’t sleep at night, they woke up in the middle of the night.”
Six people were slightly injured, and the waiter holding the birthday cake with the sparkler was charged with a misdemeanor charge of negligent arson likely to endanger life.
