At least 39 dead in Chinese hospital fire

Patients leapt from the windows of a four-storey hospital in north-eastern China to escape a fire that killed at least 39 people, the government said today.

Thousands of local residents watched helplessly as patients jumped from windows on the third and fourth floors after rescuers tried but failed to reach them, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

A hospital official said that a father caught his newborn child after a nurse threw the baby from a window.

Firefighters struggled for five hours to put out the blaze which started yesterday at City Central Hospital, the largest hospital in Liaoyuan, about 75 miles southwest of Changchun, the capital of Jilin province, witnesses said.

An initial investigation showed the fire started in a power distribution room, Xinhua said.

The remains of 24 people were found at the scene and 15 others died after being transferred to other hospitals, Xinhua said.

Rescuers today were still searching for other victims, it said.

A woman at the maternity ward of the Liaoyuan Women’s and Children’s Hospital said that a 15-day-old baby boy had been thrown from the window of the City Central Hospital by a nurse and was caught by his father, Wang Xuzhi.

The boy, who has not yet been named, was not hurt but was under observation at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, said the woman. She did not say which floor he was thrown from. It was not immediately known if the boy’s mother survived.

Some 183 patients, 20 of them in critical condition, were moved to seven other hospitals in Liaoyuan, it said. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the patients were in critical condition before the incident or were injured by the fire or attempts to escape.

Ten hospital staff were among the injured, Xinhua said.

Xinhua quoted 43-year-old patient Wang Mingwen as saying that he saved himself and his wife by tying a quilt to a heating pipe and throwing the other end out the window to climb down from the third floor.

However, his wife Ni Shuping lost her grip and fell from the second floor, seriously injuring herself, Wang said.

The Huaxi Metropolitan News, a newspaper in southern Sichuan province, said on its website that some 100 people jumped or used knotted bed sheets to escape the flames.

Another patient, Chen Zhifu, who was originally taken to hospital for an eye injury, broke both his legs jumping from the third floor, Huaxi said.

“I was really desperate, I couldn’t open my eyes, I couldn’t breathe, I had to jump or I would have burned to death,” Chen was quoted as saying.

China’s Central Television news showed about a dozen fire trucks and ambulances in front of the hospital as the last of the fire was extinguished last night. Water used to put out the flames had turned into icy patches on the concrete in the subfreezing weather.

Also yesterday, China’s Ministry of Public Security reported that from January to November there had been 222,000 accidental fires in China, resulting in more than 2,000 deaths, Xinhua said.

In recent weeks, China has experienced a number of high-profile accidents, including a series of coal mining disasters that claimed several hundred lives and a major chemical spill that poisoned a river and shut down water supplies to the northern city of Harbin.