TAIPEI • Nine people were killed and 30 injured in a blaze that broke out early yesterday at a hospice for the terminally ill near Taiwan's capital Taipei, fire officials said.
All of the 44 people inside, including 33 patients, were evacuated after the fire started at the hospice on the seventh floor of a nine-storey government hospital in New Taipei City.
New Taipei fire department official Hung Liang-chien told reporters that an initial probe showed the fire was likely caused by the short circuit of an electrical device.
"We are clarifying whether it is the power cable of the hospital's electric bed or an air cushion bed brought in by relatives (of a patient)," he said. One caregiver working in the hospice reported seeing a spark on the bed where the fire started.
Local fire chief Huang Te-ching earlier denied reports that the sprinkler system had malfunctioned.
"The sprinkler device was on, but there was some distance between its location and where the fire started, so the fire could not be put out immediately," he told reporters, adding that the authorities were also examining why there was a nine-minute delay in reporting the fire.
Closed-circuit television footage on local media showed staff rushing through the hospice corridors and carrying patients out in their arms or in wheelchairs to evacuate them after the fire broke out.
There have been nine hospital fires in Taiwan in the past decade, claiming 37 lives. The worst was in 2012, when a cancer patient started a fire in a nursing facility in southern Tainan city that killed 13 people. The arsonist was sentenced to death.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
