MIRYANG (South Korea) • A fire at a hospital and adjoining nursing home killed at least 37 people and injured more than 140 in the South Korean city of Miryang yesterday in the country’s deadliest blaze in a decade..
MIRYANG (South Korea) • A fire at a hospital and adjoining nursing home killed at least 37 people and injured more than 140 in the South Korean city of Miryang yesterday in the country’s deadliest blaze in a decade.
Officials said they were still investigating the cause of the fire which engulfed Sejong Hospital, whose director said the current law did not require the building to have a sprinkler system.
The fire, officials said, erupted in the hospital’s main building. Firefighters and hospital workers evacuated patients from an annexe that operated as a nursing home, carrying some of them on their backs.
Many patients « walked through fire and smoke » to escape from Sejong Hospital as the main exit was on the first floor, which was ablaze, a city official said. Those on upper floors used ladders and plastic escape slides to flee.
Videos posted on social media showed a patient hanging on to a rope dangling from a helicopter, and another crawling out of a window to climb down a ladder.
« So many lives were sacrificed and the people of our city, as well as those throughout the country, have fallen into deep grief, » the city’s mayor Park Il Ho told reporters.
