A fire at the Econo Lodge in Wooster, Ohio, trapped residents in a room, resulting in three fatalities. Firefighters arrived to find flames shooting through the roof. A motel employee reported a trapped man called the front desk for help. Two of the deceased were motel employees. The cause is under investigation.
A fire in a five-storey residential building in southeast Delhi's Govindpuri killed 3 family members and critically injured 2 others, with residents using sarees to escape through windows amidst flames and smoke.
An independent committee investigating the deadly November fire at Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po, Hong Kong, heard that the emergency mobile phone alert system would have taken up to an hour to activate and would have offered little help to fire services. The blaze killed 168 people — the deadliest in Hong Kong since 1948 — and displaced nearly 5,000 residents. The inquiry revealed that a property management employee accidentally disabled fire alarms while switching off hosepipes for repairs, and suggested five of seven affected towers caught fire at a late enough stage that evacuation might have been possible.
