Beijing blaze at apartment block kills at least 19
BEIJING: A blaze roared through an apartment building on the blue-collar edge of Beijing, killing at least 19 people, many of whom were apparently migrant workers from the Chinese countryside who were trapped in acrid smoke, officials and local residents said on Sunday.
The fire broke out on Saturday evening in a two-story structure in the Daxing District, about 18 kilometres south of the Chinese capital’s prosperous downtown. Around 6pm (local time), the flames began consuming the building, and thick smoke spilled into the air. Firefighters spent three hours battling the fire, according to a news release from Daxing officials.
Eight people were injured, and a “suspect” was being detained, the statement said. The release did not say whether the person had been accused of deliberately starting the fire, or of negligence.
Residents who gathered near the gutted structure on Sunday said the smoke from the fire had been thick and smelled of chemicals. They declined to give their names, apparently wary of speaking freely in front of police and officials who were watching the crowd and preventing people, including reporters, from getting within a few hundreds yards of the site.
Police have not released information about the people who died in the fire, and officials said they had no information. But many, if not all, of the victims were likely to be migrant workers who had worked or lived in the cramped, inexpensive rooms of the building.
The deaths were a jarring reminder that Beijing is a city divided between its wealthy, well-guarded core and poorer, scrappier outskirts.
Downtown Beijing is crowded with new skyscrapers, shopping malls and wealthier middle-class residents. This was the side of the city on show last month, when a Communist Party congress in the Great Hall of the People appointed President Xi Jinping as party leader for five more years.
But many menial workers who keep the Chinese capital going — cleaners, couriers, factory workers, stall owners — are migrants from villages who live on the fringes of the city because of high housing prices and government policies that have been forcing them out of downtown.
Xihongmen Town, the area in Daxing where the fire broke out, is a patchwork of roughly built houses and apartments, garment workshops and factories. It has an estimated 175,000 inhabitants, and about 150,000 of them are migrants from other parts of China, according to government statistics.
In 2011, a fire in a clothing factory in southern Beijing killed at least 17 people.
One Chinese news website, The Paper, quoted a resident who said the victims of the latest fire also appeared to be workers in a garment-making workshop in the basement of the building. That report later disappeared from the website.
The official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, issued a brief bulletin about the fire.
Two residents also said that the basement was the heart of the fire. They and others said they could not understand why the victims could not escape, especially since the blaze started well before anyone would have been asleep.
Officials said that an inquiry would take time to yield results.
“The cause of the accident is being investigated, and a suspect has already been placed under mandatory measures,” said the government’s news release, using a euphemism for detention.
But the government announcements showed that safety officials had long known that the area was plagued by fire hazards, and that they had tried to reduce them through inspections and fire drills.
In July, the Daxing District Fire Department named the neighbourhood where the apartment went up in flames a “major disaster zone” for fire hazards, and said there would be extra checks for dangers.