PIMS Fire Investigation Report: Ward Burned in 2 Minutes, Response Took 15

PIMS Fire Investigation Report: 

Pakistan Times | Islamabad Times

Date: August 29, 2026

The investigation report into the fire at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) has laid bare a troubling timeline of delays, revealing that the entire ward was consumed by flames within just two minutes, while emergency responders took far longer to reach the scene.

A Timeline of Critical Delays

According to the findings, the fire spread with alarming speed, engulfing the whole ward in roughly two minutes. Despite the rapid escalation, emergency services were not contacted until six minutes after the fire broke out. Response teams then took an additional 15 minutes to actually arrive at the site, meaning more than 20 minutes had elapsed between the outbreak of the fire and the arrival of help.

The report identifies this window  from ignition to the arrival of emergency responders  as the central failure point of the entire episode. Investigators note that in a fire of this speed and intensity, every additional minute without intervention translates directly into greater loss of life and property, particularly in a hospital ward where patients may have limited mobility and cannot evacuate quickly on their own.

Why the Delay Matters

Fire safety experts generally regard the first few minutes after ignition as the critical window in which a blaze can either be contained or allowed to become unmanageable. In this case, by the time the ward was fully engulfed at the two-minute mark, no external response had even been initiated yet — the call to emergency services was still four minutes away. This means the fire was already at its most dangerous stage before help was even alerted, let alone dispatched.

The six-minute gap before the call was made raises questions about whether internal fire detection systems, staff training, or reporting protocols failed at the hospital. Meanwhile, the 15-minute response time from emergency services once contacted points to a separate set of issues — potentially related to distance, traffic, staffing, or readiness of the responding units.

How This Connects to the Broader Response

The findings come shortly after the federal government ordered an immediate, comprehensive fire safety audit of all federal hospitals, to be carried out by an authorized third-party fire safety company. Separately, the Prime Minister has already approved the suspension of eight officials identified by a fact-finding committee as responsible for lapses connected to the incident, while Dr. Muhammad Salman, CEO of the National Institutes of Health, has been appointed Acting Executive Director of PIMS to oversee the hospital during this period.

Taken together, this timeline data adds a concrete, minute-by-minute dimension to those earlier administrative actions. Where the suspension of officials addressed accountability and the fire safety audit addressed prevention, this report addresses response  showing precisely how much time was lost between the fire starting and help arriving, and why closing that gap will likely be a central focus of any reforms that follow.

What Needs to Change

Officials reviewing the report are expected to examine three areas in particular: how quickly hospital staff detect and report fires internally, how fast emergency services can be dispatched once alerted, and how quickly response teams can physically reach hospital sites. Without improvements across all three stages, experts warn, hospitals will remain vulnerable to fires escalating beyond control before meaningful intervention becomes possible.

Read More:

PIMS Hospital Fire: 14 Newborns Killed as Investigation Committee Formed