Patients leapt from the windows of a four-story hospital in northeastern China to escape a fire that killed at least 39 people, the government said yesterday.
Thousands of residents watched helplessly as patients jumped from windows on the third and fourth floors after rescuers tried but failed to reach them, the official Xinhua news agency said.
One newspaper said on its Web site that a father caught his newborn child after a nurse threw the baby from a second floor window.
Firefighters struggled for five hours to put out the blaze which started on Thursday at the largest hospital in Liaoyuan, about 120km southwest of Changchun, the capital of Jilin Province, witnesses said.
Temperatures overnight were reported as low as minus 17?C.
A woman who answered the telephone at the maternity ward of the Liaoyuan Women's and Children's Hospital said a newborn baby boy was thrown from the window of the City Central Hospital by a nurse and was caught by his father, Wang Xuzhi.
The boy, who has not yet been named, was not hurt but was under observation at the Women's and Children's Hospital, said the woman, who declined to give her name.
She did not say which floor he was thrown from. It was not immediately known if the boy's mother or the nurse who saved him survived.
An initial investigation showed the fire started in a power distribution room, Xinhua said.
The remains of 24 people were found at the scene and 15 others died after being transferred to other hospitals, Xinhua said.
Rescuers were still searching for other victims yesterday, it said.
Some 183 patients, 20 of them in critical condition, were moved to seven other hospitals in Liaoyuan, it said. It wasn't immediately clear whether the patients were in critical condition before the incident or were injured by the fire or attempts to escape.
Ten hospital staff were among the injured, Xinhua said.
Xinhua quoted 43-year-old patient Wang Mingwen as saying that he saved himself and his wife by tying a quilt to a heating pipe and throwing the other end out the window to climb down from the third floor.
However, his wife Ni Shuping lost her grip and fell from the second floor, seriously injuring herself, Wang said.
The Huaxi Metropolitan News, a newspaper in Sichuan Province, said on its Web site that some 100 people jumped or used knotted bed sheets to escape the flames.
Another patient, Chen Zhifu, who was originally hospitalized for an eye injury, broke both his legs jumping from the third floor, Huaxi said.
"I was really desperate, I couldn't open my eyes, I couldn't breathe, I had to jump or I would have burned to death," Chen was quoted as saying.
TV news showed about a dozen fire trucks and ambulances in front of the hospital as the last of the fire was extinguished late on Thursday night.
Water used to put out the flames had turned into icy patches on the concrete in the subfreezing weather.
Also on Thursday, the Ministry of Public Security reported that from January to last month there had been 222,000 accidental fires in China, resulting in more than 2,000 deaths, Xinhua said.
In recent weeks, China has experienced a number of high-profile accidents, including a series of coal mining disasters that claimed several hundred lives and a major chemical spill that poisoned a river and shut down water supplies to Harbin.
RSS