8 children among 12 dead in house fire

PHILADELPHIA－Jacuita Purifoy lost 10 family members when a fire tore through a converted three-story house in Philadelphia on Wednesday, killing 12 people in one of the United States' deadliest residential infernos in recent years.

"My sisters and my nephews and my nieces are gone. They are never coming back again," said the 37-year-old outside a nearby elementary school where families of victims were consoling each other.

The Philadelphia Mayor's Office said 12 people, including eight children, were killed in the city's deadliest single fire in more than a century, revising an earlier toll of 13 victims.

Purifoy lost seven young relatives, the youngest of whom was just 1 year old.

Three of Purifoy's sisters also died in the fire, which happened just before sunrise in the popular museum district of Fairmount.

"I am in shock. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to say,"Purifoy said.

Officials said eight people escaped the flames, while another two were hospitalized, one of whom is Purifoy's 5-year-old nephew.

"Everybody is gone except for one child," she said.

"He doesn't know what's going on. He wants his mom, he wants his dad, he wants his sisters, he wants his cousins. He wants everybody that he had lived with for the past five years."

At the Bache-Martin Elementary School, a block away from the site of the disaster, a Salvation Army truck handed out supplies to relatives.

Probe underway

Purifoy rubbed the back of her sister Qaadira, who wept as she tried to keep out the cold with a Salvation Army blanket.

Near the burned building, a resident laid a white rose on the ground under police tape.

"This is without a doubt one of the most tragic days in our city's history. The loss of so many people in such a tragic way," Mayor Jim Kenney told reporters on Wednesday.

Philadelphia Fire Department deputy commissioner Craig Murphy said it was too early to say what caused the blaze, but that his department was investigating.

He said there were four smoke detectors in the building, but none of them had been operating.

The building is owned by Philadelphia's public housing authority, which said the detectors had last been inspected in May 2021 and "were operating properly at that time".

Officers found "heavy fire" coming from the second floor of the three-story row house when they arrived at 6:40 am, and it took almost an hour to get it under control, the fire department said.

The odd configuration of the building－originally a single-family home that had been split into two apartments－made it difficult to navigate, Murphy said.

About 26 people had been living in the building－eight on the first floor and 18 across the second and third floors. It was not clear how many people were in the building at the time of the fire.

Agencies - China Daily