Four elderly people died and 14 were in serious condition after a fire ripped through a Sydney nursing home yesterday in what emergency services called their “worst nightmare.”
Hundreds of firefighters, police and paramedics raced to the Quakers Hill Nursing Home in the early hours of the morning after an automatic fire alarm went off, to find a “chaotic and tragic” scene.
“This is a firefighter’s worst nightmare — turning up to a nursing home where there are elderly people who can’t get themselves out of harm’s way,” New South Wales Fire and Rescue Commissioner Greg Mullins said. “We had dozens of firefighters in breathing apparatus working in thick black smoke where they couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces, so imagine what it was like for the elderly trying to escape.”
New South Wales Police Superintendent Robert Redfern said that three bodies had been found in the smoldering building.
Ambulance officials added that many residents were hurt in the disaster with 14 in intensive care, some with severe burns.
Redfern said that with the injured so old and frail, the death toll might rise. Earlier reports had suggested up to nine people might have died.
“To the best of my knowledge we have identified all of the people who were in the premises at the time,” the police chief said.
“We have saved lives today by the outstanding work of the emergency services,” he added, after emergency crews reached the scene within six minutes of the alarm being raised.
Rescuers had to go into the building on hands and knees in acrid smoke to save anyone they could, Mullins said.
Dozens of disorientated people were seen lying on beds or sitting in wheelchairs outside the home in the aftermath, some of them being attended to by paramedics.
About 100 people, some blind or suffering dementia, were evacuated from the building and New South Wales Ambulance Assistant Commissioner Mike Willis said the injured were rushed to nine Sydney hospitals.
“It was a chaotic scene that confronted us,” he said.
Officials said the fire was believed to have broken out in two areas of the facility, with homicide and arson squad detectives on the scene to investigate the cause.
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