At least 11 people, many of them elderly, were killed when a fire swept through a hospital in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro as staff and desperate visitors battled to rescue patients from smoke-filled wards.
Hospital authorities said the blaze late on Thursday was thought to have been caused by a short circuit in a generator, although the city mayor said that sabotage could not be ruled out.
Firefighters tackled the fire at the private Badim Hospital, near Rio’s Maracana World Cup soccer stadium, for several hours before finally managing to extinguish it.
The city’s forensic institute said that most of the dead were aged 66 or older, many of whom were in the intensive care unit.
“The majority were due to suffocation and other causes related to the accident... The devices keeping them alive stopped working because of the fire,” forensic institute director Gabriela Graca told local media.
Emergency personnel searched through the burned-out building until the early hours of Friday to recover bodies.
There had been 103 patients in the building when the fire broke out and that “more than 100 doctors were mobilized to bring help to the victims,” the hospital said, and that 77 of them had been moved to other hospitals, while 14 had been cleared to return home.
During the evacuation, patients on gurneys and stretchers were carried into surrounding streets as ambulances struggled through crowds of curious onlookers to transport patients to other medical facilities.
Sheets tied together were seen hanging from hospital windows.
“I was able to take my mother out of her room and when we got to the fire escape, there were a lot of people running around,” lawyer Carlos Otorelo, whose 93-year-old mother was being treated for pneumonia, told the UOL news Web site. “It was terrible because the smoke spread very quickly.”
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