High-Rise Fire Kills 14 in Taiyuan, Northern China

A fire in a high-rise residential building in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province in northern China, killed 14 people on Sunday, the state run Xinhua news agency said on Monday.

The fire broke out at 4:59 p.m. local time (0859 GMT) in a 40 storey building on a busy main road in downtown Taiyuan. Smoke poured over the tower as firefighters working from cranes outside fought flames spreading from the middle of the building, in video images circulated online and verified by Reuters.

Out in two hours, toll rising overnight

Crews put the fire out after about two hours, and authorities said rescue operations ended at 8:30 p.m. A total of 38 people were taken to hospital. Five of them were confirmed dead by late Sunday night. By Monday morning, the death toll had risen to 14. State media said 25 people were still in hospital on Monday, nine of them with serious injuries.

Regional media identified the building as the Hao Sheng International Apartment, a residential tower built in 2007 on Liuxiang South Road in Yingze district, in the commercial centre of the city. Reports said the building holds flats alongside a hotel and children's education centres.

Cause not yet known

Xinhua said the cause of the fire is under investigation. Authorities have not said where in the building the fire started or how it spread.

Taiyuan is the capital of Shanxi, a province built on coal and heavy industry, and home to more than five million people. Like many Chinese cities, it has grown upward for decades, and residential towers from the building boom years now stand over its commercial districts. Sunday's fire is the latest in a series of deadly building fires in China in recent years, which have kept attention on fire safety in the country's older high-rise housing.

Questions left open

By Monday afternoon, officials had not named the dead or given their ages, and state media carried no report of arrests or detentions. The open questions are basic ones: where the fire started, what caught fire first, and how the flames moved through a residential tower in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. Xinhua said the investigation is under way and that arrangements for the victims and their families have been triggered.