Nearly 100 killed in Iraqi COVID ward hospital fire
NASSIRIYA, Iraq (Reuters) – The death toll from a fire that tore through a coronavirus hospital in southern Iraq stood at 96, health officials said on Tuesday, as authorities faced accusations of negligence from grieving relatives and an employee.
Twelve people – patients and visitors to the hospital – were still missing, two health sources said, suggesting the toll from Monday’s fire could climb.
More than 100 others were injured in the blaze, which an investigation showed began when sparks from faulty wiring spread to an oxygen tank that then exploded, police and civil defense authorities said.
Rescue teams were using a heavy crane to remove the charred and melted remains of the part of the city’s al-Hussain hospital where COVID-19 patients were being treated, as relatives gathered nearby.
A medic at the hospital, who declined to give his name and whose Monday shift ended a few hours before the fire broke out, said the absence of basic of safety measures meant it was an accident in the making.
“The hospital lacks a fire sprinkler system or even a simple fire alarm,” he said.
“We complained many times
over the past three months that a tragedy could happen any moment from a cigarette stub but every time we get the same answer from health officials: ‘we don’t have enough money’.”
In April, a similar explosion at Baghdad COVID-19 hospital killed at least 82 and injured 110. The head of Iraq’s semi-official Human Rights Commission said Monday’s blast showed how ineffective safety measures still were in a health system crippled by war and sanctions.
“To have such a tragic incident repeated few months later means that still no (sufficient) measures have been taken to
prevent them,” Ali Bayati said.
The fact that the hospital had been built with lightweight sandwich panels separating the wards had made the fire spread faster, local civil defense authority head Salah Jabbar said.
Health and civil defense managers in the city and the hospital’s manager had been suspended and arrested on Monday on the orders of Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi.
Government investigators arrived in Nassiriya on Tuesday morning, according to a statement. Their findings would be announced within a week, Kadhimi’s office said.
President Barham Salih, on Twitter, said both fires were “the result of endemic corruption and mismanagement that disregards the lives of Iraqis.”
At the city’s morgue, anger spread among people gathered as they waited to receive bodies.
“No quick response to the fire, not enough firefighters. Sick people burned to death. It’s a disaster,” said Mohammed Fadhil, who was waiting there to receive his bother’s body.
The blaze trapped many patients inside the coronavirus ward who rescue teams struggled to reach, a health worker told Reuters..