- Staff removed 71 patients after the fire broke out on Tuesday at around 1pm
- Videos appeared to show people climbing out of windows and down bedsheets
A total of 21 people have died in a fire at a Beijing hospital that forced the evacuation of dozens of patients, Chinese state media reported.
Staff removed 71 patients after the fire broke out on Tuesday in the inpatient department of Beijing Changfeng Hospital, state media – including CGTN – said.
Videos of the fire circulating on social media show black smoke billowing from the building, with some people frantically climbing out of the windows using what appear to be makeshift ropes made out of bedsheets.
Others took refuge on air conditioning units outside the windows. One woman is seen climbing to the end of a bedsheet and dropping from a height onto a separate roof on another level of the building, where others have already gathered.
Emergency response teams first received word just before 1pm local time (0500 GMT) that a fire had broken out at the Hospital in the capital city’s Fengtai District.
The fire was extinguished about half an hour later and rescue efforts continued for about another two hours. The death toll was put at 21 by 6 pm, news reports said.
State media said the fire has been extinguished and rescue work has been completed, and that the cause of the fire is under investigation.
It was not immediately clear if all the occupants of the hospital had been found and evacuated from the fire, which was in the east building of the private hospital’s inpatient department.
The deaths were confirmed after the victims were taken to another unidentified hospital for emergency treatment, the report said.
Further details were not available on the number of injuries suffered in the fire or their condition.
One user of Weibo, the Chinese social media platform, described the fire as ‘tragic’.
‘I can see the accident from the window of my house. A lot of people were standing on the air conditioning unit at noon, and some even jumped off,’ they wrote.
This tallied with what was seen in at least two videos online, both of which were filed from another building facing the hospital’s grey edifice.
Beijing Changfeng Hospital is in the capital’s western urban area, about 25 minutes by car from central Tiananmen Square.
The deadly fire comes after 38 people were killed in a factory blaze in central China last year, which was blamed on workers using illegal wadding.
The fire broke out at a plant in Anyang City in Henan Province on November 21, news agency Xinhua reported at the time.
Just four days later, an apartment fire in Xinjiang killed 10 people, while two months earlier, another fire engulfed a skyscraper in the city of Changsha.
There were no fatalities reported in the Changsha incident.
