37 KILLED IN HOSPITAL FIRE
Patients had to ‘walk through smoke and flames’ to escape as blaze was near main exit
AFIRE in a hospital that did not have a sprinkler system killed at least 37 people and injured more than 70 others yesterday, officials said, the latest tragedy to raise concerns over the coun- try’s safety standards.
Many patients “walked through fire and smoke” to escape the blaze at the Sejong Hospital, in the southern city of Miryang, as the main exit was on the first floor which was ablaze, a city official said. Other patients used ladders and plastic escape slides to flee upper floors, while firefighters carried patients who could not walk.
The fire is the deadliest in the country in at least a decade, and follows a fire last month which killed 29 people in a high-rise sports centre.
The presidential Blue House initially said the fire killed at least 41, but then deferred to the city’s fire chief who put the death toll at 37. A list posted by fire officials outside the hospital identified at least 26 of the victims by name.
On a wall at a funeral home next to the hospital, officials had scrawled a handwritten list of names and hospital rooms as family members gathered to look.
The fire started at 7.30am at the rear of the emergency room on the first floor of the hospital, said Choi Man-woo, the head of Miryang city’s fire station.
With a population of around 108,000, Miryang is about 270km southeast of the capital here.
News footage showed a huge pall of black smoke billowing from the hospital’s windows and entrance with flames flickering.
At least 177 patients — most of them elderly — were at the hospital and an adjacent nursing home when the fire broke out.
At least one doctor, a nurse, and a nurse’s aide were killed on the second floor.
Officials said they were looking closely at a possible short circuit in the emergency room’s heating and cooling system.