A five-year-old child died and seven people, including several other children, were hospitalized Wednesday morning following the fire in an apartment in an indebted private condominium in Marseille, we learned from the marine firefighters.
The victim, seriously burned, succumbed to his injuries on the spot during his medical care, we said from the same source confirming information from the daily Provence.
Among the seven people hospitalized with burns or smoke poisoning are a two-month-old baby with 3rd degree burns, a six-year-old girl, another child, a 25-year-old mother and a couple, the ‘AFP the marine firefighters.
Four other people, more slightly intoxicated by the smoke, were treated on the spot.
The fire broke out shortly before 8:00 a.m. on the ninth and penultimate floor of a building in the Cité des Rosiers located in the working-class neighborhoods north of Marseille. Some 80 firefighters and around twenty devices were mobilized to extinguish the fire, the origin of which is currently unknown.
The mayor of Marseille Benoît Payan tweeted his “deep sadness following (this) terrible tragedy”, addressing his thoughts to “the families and (to) relatives of the victims struck with immense pain”.
A technical report had reported “disorders relating to electricity, lighting, gas networks, plumbing and elevators” on three buildings in the city, told AFP at the end of July the town hall of Marseille who had obtained owners carrying out emergency work.
It is not known if the fire concerns one of these buildings but the marine firefighters told AFP “that no risk factor” was observed during the intervention due to a problem related “to the obsolescence “of the premises.
The municipality had told AFP in July that it had carried out several interventions to detect unsanitary conditions in the city, specifying that this action might not “constitute the only response to the problematic situation of the Rosiers which, she said,” requires a global and collective action with all the competent housing institutions “.