News of Tuesday’s fire — one of Beijing’s deadliest in recent years — was initially heavily censored on Chinese social media, and there was a delay of several hours between the incident and its coverage in state media, prompting anger among local residents.
Many relatives also expressed their anger over the amount of time it took for the hospital to contact them, telling Chinese media outlets they had no contact from the hospital up to eight hours after the fire.
The fire also left 39 people requiring hospital treatment, including three in a critical condition, Li Ang, deputy director of the Beijing Health Commission, said in a news conference Wednesday.
Zhao Yang, an official at Beijing’s fire department, said a preliminary investigation showed that the fire appeared to have begun after a spark from renovations ignited flammable paint stored at the hospital. Firefighters extinguished the blaze in about half an hour, Zhao said, adding that further investigations were underway.
The closest fire station to the hospital is about 300 meters, or a two-minute drive, away.
The 12 people who were taken into custody Wednesday included the hospital’s president and construction workers, Li said, adding that they were detained on suspicion of “serious liability incidents.”
In late February, Changfeng Hospital said on messaging app WeChat that it had “strictly implemented” safety measures and “made solid deployments” to prevent fires. The post has since been deleted, and the hospital’s website was also taken offline.
Tuesday’s fire began around 1 p.m. on Tuesday, but was only publicly acknowledged by the government and reported in the news in the evening.
On Chinese microblogging site Weibo, one user lamented: “What is most scary is how almost all media can only become bystanders who remain silent. We can only read cold press releases from official outlets and cannot see the immense despair caused by the accident… the media should be a discoverer of social problems, a channel to release social pressure, a motivator of the government to facilitate social development. Now, what is the media?”
As state media outlets began to cover the disaster, relatives of the patients also began to express their anger at the hospital and the lack of communication.
“We don’t know [about the fire] if we don’t watch the news,” one relative told state-owned Chinese Youth Daily, while the daughter of one patient told Sanlian news magazine that she arrived at the hospital on Tuesday evening, and was not told until the next day that her 76-year-old father, who was paralyzed and had a cognitive impairment, was among the dead.
A medical worker involved in the rescue told state-owned Southern Weekly said it had been difficult evacuating patients as many were elderly and had difficulty walking, especially as some of the rooms were very narrow.
Industrial fires are not uncommon in China: In 2015, a chemical explosion in the northern coastal city of Tianjin killed more than 170 people.
