South Korea: Fire in hospital housing elderly people kills at least 37

January 26, 2018

Fire broke out on Friday morning and destroyed the bottom two floors of a six-story hospital in, South Korea, killing at least 37 people, most of them elderly. More than a hundred injuries were reported, with eighteen people in. This is the highest death toll from fire in South Korea in almost a decade.

The fire is believed to have started at about 7:30, according to fire chief Choi Man-woo. It originated on the ground floor in the as per various officials. The hospital has 98 beds and a medical staff of about 35, and specializes in long-term care of elderly patients. It adjoins a nursing home, all of whose 94 residents were evacuated. Staff carried some patients out of the hospital on their backs.

One patient, Jang Yeong-jae, who told his story to , said he escaped by removing a screen from a window to get to a ladder placed by firefighters. He described people "running around in panic, falling over and screaming as smoke filled the rooms". The majority of the victims died from and are believed to be elderly, said the head of the city's public hospital, Chun Jae-kyung. A doctor, a nurse, and a nursing assistant have died, according to the fire service; it took three hours to put out the fire.

In a press briefing, Seok Gyeong-sik, the director of the hospital, apologized to patients and their families. Son Kyung-chul, its chairman, stated that there were no sprinklers because the facility was small. are being installed in the nursing home, where a new law requires them by June 30.

Last month, 29 people died in a fire in a gym in ; the owner and the manager were arrested for safety violations. In 2014, a blaze in a nursing home in left 21 dead. The President of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, responded to the Friday fire by calling an emergency meeting of his staff, and promised that the cause would be found rapidly "to prevent the recurrence of the fire in the future".