Emergency
services pass a stretcher carrying another injured student down a ladder after
putting out the blaze.
A nighttime fire at a boarding
school dormitory in northern Thailand killed 18 girls ranging from 5 to 12
years old, police and school officials said Monday. Five others were injured.
The two-story wooden structure,
which caught fire Sunday night, housed 38 girls, most of them belonging to the
area's ethnic minorities. Fifteen girls escaped without injuries. The cause of
the fire was not immediately known.
Some of the students were still not
asleep when the fire broke out and were able to raise the alarm, said Rewat
Wassana, manager of the Pithakkaiat Witthaya School, to which the dorm is
attached.
The kindergarten and primary school
in Wiang Pa Pao district, just outside the city of Chiang Rai, has about 400
day students and boarders. It is about 500 miles north of Bangkok.
Rewat said the fire broke out in the
dorm's lower level, which is used for activities. The upper level housed the
sleeping quarters. It is one of the two dorms on the 20-acre school grounds.
The other dorm, which is located nearby and is for boys, was untouched, Rewat
said.
"We have a teacher who sleeps
with the girls in the dorm. She tried to help the students escape," Rewat
told reporters at a news conference that was broadcast on local television
channels.
A 11-year-old girl identified only
as Suchada told the same news conference that she had gotten up to go to the
bathroom when she noticed the fire downstairs, and ran to tell her friends in
various rooms. But some of them didn't believe her and closed the door on her
to go back to sleep, she said.
"We remembered some lessons
from Girl Scouts to tie cloth together to make a long rope and we climbed out
of the window," the fifth-grade student said. "The teacher helped us.
While the teacher was climbing down, the rope tore and she hurt her leg and
waist."
Most of the victims had shut
themselves in their rooms thinking Suchada was playing a prank. Each room
sleeps seven or eight girls.
A police official told The
Associated Press by phone that besides the 18 dead, another five girls were
injured, including two in serious condition. He said two of the bodies were so
badly burned they were unidentifiable. The official did not wish to be
identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Firefighters took three hours to
extinguish the fire, and pulled survivors and bodies from the second-story
window of the wooden building.
Credit: Fox News
No comments:
Post a Comment