A fire in a Taichung apartment building on Sunday that left six people dead and six injured was complicated by clutter in stairwells that made firefighters’ jobs harder and could have boxed in those fleeing, the city’s fire bureau said yesterday.
The Taichung City Fire Bureau said it dispatched 85 people and 22 fire trucks and ambulances after receiving an emergency call at 4:29pm reporting a fire in a seven-story building in the city’s Central District (中區).
After bringing the blaze under control at 6:30pm, firefighters entered the building and found the bodies of six people on the third, fifth and seventh floors, as well as in an addition built on the roof, it said.
Photo: Hsu Kuo-chen, Taipei Times
They also discovered large amounts of clutter in the stairwells, which hindered rescue efforts and might have also blocked escape routes and helped the fire spread, a bureau official said.
Six people escaped with injuries that were not life-threatening, including two who were rescued using aerial ladders and one who was pulled from an elevator on the second floor.
Two other survivors managed to climb down from the third floor along external water pipes, while one man jumped to safety from the fifth floor, the bureau said.
Lee Chen-yen (李震雁), a commander in the bureau’s Seventh Fire Brigade, said that smoke was pouring out of every floor of the building when firefighters arrived.
Despite seeing people on the sixth floor trying to escape, firefighters were unable to deploy their aerial ladders at first, as vehicles parked on both sides of the street prevented them from putting down outriggers to stabilize their trucks, he said.
When they entered the building, they found that the stairwells were hard to get past because of haphazardly stacked materials.
In an interview late on Sunday, local borough warden Tsai Tsui-pi (蔡翠碧) said the building belonged to a woman in her 70s surnamed Chuang (莊), and had been converted from a hotel into more than 40 studio apartments.
To augment her rental income, Chuang took in large quantities of materials to recycle, which she stored on the first floor and in the stairwells of the building, leading to multiple complaints from people in the area, Tsai said.
Chuang, who was rescued from an elevator and treated for smoke inhalation, was questioned by police after being discharged from hospital early yesterday.
Police said she told them that she smelled smoke and got in the elevator to find out where it was coming from.
Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) yesterday said city records showed that Chuang had received 24 fines related to public safety in the past two years due to conditions in the building, and was charged with endangering public safety late last year.
To date, only 11 of the 24 fines — NT$66,240 of NT$144,000 in total — had been paid, and authorities were in the process of seeking court orders to seize the rest, the Taichung City Environmental Protection Bureau said.
The Environmental Protection Bureau said that it had also been sending personnel twice a month to remove garbage from the building, most recently on Friday.
During the most recent visit, workers cleared out 1,120kg of garbage and recyclables, filling three trucks, Apple Daily reported.
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