Sat, Jan 27, 2018 page1

• Fire at hospital in South Korea kills 37, injures scores

  • AFP, SEOUL
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  A huge fire yesterday tore through a South Korean hospital, killing at least 37 people, the government said, in the country’s worst blaze in a decade.

  About 130 were hurt in the fire, which came just weeks before thousands of athletes and foreign visitors are expected in the country for the Winter Olympics.

  While South Korea has risen to become the world’s 11th-largest economy, some of its infrastructure was built rapidly and it has a history of preventable disasters.

  

  Firefighters lift an injured woman off the back of a firefighter who evacuated her from a burned-out hospital in Miryang, South Korea, yesterday.

  Photo: EPA-EFE

  It was the country’s second major blaze in a month, and officials admitted that there was no sprinkler system installed at the hospital.

  Videos posted on social media showed a patient hanging onto a rope dangling from a helicopter above the hospital in Miryang, in the far south, and another crawling out of a window to climb down a ladder.

  The death toll rose rapidly throughout the morning as some of those initially pulled from the blaze succumbed to their injuries.

  At one point, the presidential Blue House put it at 41, before authorities lowered it to 37, blaming double counting.

  Three of the dead were medical personnel, officials said.

  “Two nurses said they had seen fire suddenly erupting in the emergency room,” Miryang Fire Station Chief Choi Man-woo said.

  The six-story structure housed a nursing home, as well as Sejong Hospital, and about 200 people were inside when the fire broke out, police said.

  All the dead were in the hospital, Choi said.

  Video footage and pictures showed the building engulfed by thick, dark smoke and surrounded by multiple fire engines.

  Survivors were carried out wrapped in blankets, and firefighters picked their way through the blackened shell of the building after the blaze was extinguished.

  Jang Yeong-jae, a surviving patient, said he was on the second floor when nurses screamed “Fire!” in the hallway and urged people to leave through the emergency exits.

  “But when I opened the exit door, the whole stairway was filled with dark smoke and I couldn’t see a thing,” he told Seoul’s JoongAng Ilbo newspaper.

  “Everybody was running around in panic, falling over and screaming as smoke filled the rooms,” he was quoted as saying.

  Jang said he tore open window screens and escaped on a ladder erected by firefighters.

  “There were so many elderly patients on other floors... I wonder if they escaped safely,” JoongAng Ilbo quoted Jang’s wife as saying.

  Hospital director Son Gyeong-cheol admitted there was no sprinkler system in the building.

  None had been required under fire prevention laws, but the hospital had planned to install them next week to comply with new regulations going into effect in June, he told reporters.

  “There were two heating-cooling air-conditioners in the emergency room and the fire started in that area,” Son said. “We suspect electrical short circuits.”

  Choi apologized for “failing to rescue each and every one” of the patients caught in the fire.

  “When our fast-reaction squad arrived at the scene, the building was already engulfed in thick smoke and flames and they were unable to make their way into it,” Choi said.

  South Korean President Moon Jae-in called an emergency meeting with advisers and demanded an immediate probe into the cause of the blaze.

  The fire came only a month after 29 people were killed in an inferno at a fitness club in the southern city of Jecheon — a disaster blamed on insufficient emergency exits, flammable finishing materials and illegally parked cars blocking access to emergency vehicles.

  Yesterday’s fire was South Korea’s worst since 2008, when a blaze at a warehouse in Icheon killed 40 workers.

  The worst fire in modern South Korean history was an arson attack on a subway station in southeastern Daegu in 2003 that left 192 people dead and nearly 150 injured.
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