Nursing home fire kills dozens

Chinese facility ‘built with flammable foam filling’

AFIRE at a nursing home in central China left at least 38 people dead, officials said yesterday, with bodies burnt beyond recognition and wheelchairs reduced to charred frames.

The fire broke out on Monday evening in an apartment building at a privately owned old people’s home in Pingdingshan, the state news agency Xinhua said.

“The bodies were so badly burnt, we couldn’t tell who was who,” Xinhua quoted one victim’s relative as saying of the identification process.

Pictures posted online showed a thick column of black smoke rising from behind a petrol station near the facility. Another displayed the blackened frame of a building, with a burnt-out wheelchair in the foreground.

“Only myself and one other roommate managed to get out,” survivor Zhao Yulan, 82, who shared her room with 11 others, said.

The agency said the home had 51 residents and the blaze was extinguished less than an hour after it broke out. Two of the injured were in a critical condition in hospital, the work safety bureau of the central province of Henan said.

The cause of the fire remained unclear, but a provincial television station quoted another resident blaming an electrical fault. The building was constructed from steel with flammable foam fillings, the state-run China News Service said yesterday.

Enforcement of safety standards is often lax in China, with some property and business owners paying off corrupt officials to look the other way.

The country’s vast population is ageing rapidly, with 15.5% aged 60 or more by the end of last year, according to official statistics.

Nursing homes are becoming more common but are often the last choice in a culture where the elderly have traditionally lived in multi-generational households.

Care workers in such facilities are often outnumbered several times over by sick and elderly residents. Survivor Chen Runde, 80, said the home had “too many” residents and the workers “cannot attend to all of us”.

The home was set up by a local farmer and the residents were mostly old villagers whose children had sought jobs far from home as migrant workers.

The incident “highlights pain in ageing China”, Xinhua said in a commentary, with care and services for the elderly still severely lagging in the country.

“Urbanisation has attracted more young people to towns and cities, leaving their old parents . . . with no other choice but to live in poorly equipped nursing facilities for the rest of their lives.”

In 2013, 11 nursing home residents burnt to death in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang after one set the facility on fire in a row over money.

A boy of nine was detained in February after a shopping mall inferno killed 17 people in Huidong, in southern Guangdong. Police said that blaze was “caused by a boy playing with fire at the mall”.

A fire at a poultry plant in the northeast of the country killed 119 people in 2013. Reports said managers had locked doors inside the factory to prevent workers from going to the toilet, leading to the high death toll. – AFP