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Fire in Taiyuan high-rise kills 14 as toll rises overnight
A fire in a mixed-use high-rise in downtown Taiyuan killed 14 people and sent 38 to hospital; the toll rose from five confirmed on Sunday night, and the cause is still under investigation.
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A fire that broke out in a high-rise in the northern Chinese city of Taiyuan on Sunday evening killed 14 people, according to the official Xinhua news agency, with the death toll climbing overnight after five deaths were first confirmed.
The blaze began at about 4:59 p.m. local time in a building on a busy downtown road in Yingze district, and firefighters had it out within about two hours, with rescue work wrapped up by 8:30 p.m. Thirty-eight people were taken to hospital, and state media said 25 were still in hospital on Monday, nine of them seriously hurt.
The building is a mixed-use tower of flats, hotels, short-term rentals and children's tutoring centres on Liuxiang South Road, in Taiyuan's commercial centre. Video circulating online, verified by Reuters, showed smoke pouring from the 40-storey structure as firefighters worked from cranes outside, with flames spreading upward from a lower annex.
What Xinhua and the outlets carrying its account establish is the toll, the timing and the scale of the hospital response; the fire appears to have started around the fourth floor of an annex before reaching the eighth and ninth floors, which house a hotel. What no official account has yet established is how the fire started, how it spread through the building, or what happened inside it — the cause remains under investigation, and the district government has said only that treatment of the injured and follow-up work are under way.
The toll is the starkest part of the story, but the building itself raises the harder question. A tower packed with homes, hotels and classrooms for children sits above one of Taiyuan's busiest shopping streets, and a fire that began low in the structure still killed 14 people before it was out. Until investigators say what ignited it and why it moved as it did, the deaths will sit alongside a familiar run of fatal fires in Chinese cities rather than as an explained accident.
Investigators have given no timetable for their findings, and the next confirmed development will be the official statement on the cause.