The price from a fireplace that tore through a coronavirus hospital in southern Iraq rose to 92, health officials said on Tuesday, as authorities faced accusations of negligence from grieving relatives and a doctor who works there.
More than 100 people were injured within the blaze on Monday night in Nassiriya, officials said.
An investigation showed the hearth began when sparks from faulty wiring spread to an oxygen tank that then exploded, police and civil defence authorities said.
It was Iraq’s second such tragedy in three months, and therefore the country’s president on Tuesday blamed corruption for both. a press release from the prime minister’s office involved national mourning.
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Rescue teams were employing a heavy crane to get rid of the charred and melted remains of the part of the city’s al-Hussain hospital where Covid-19 patients were being treated, as relatives gathered nearby.
A medic at the hospital, who declined to offer his name and whose shift ended a couple of hours before the hearth broke out, said the absence of basic safety measures meant it had been an accident within the making.
“The hospital lacks a fireplace system or maybe an easy fire alarm,” he told Reuters.
“We complained repeatedly over the past three months that a tragedy could happen any moment from a cigarette stub but whenever we get an equivalent answer from health officials: ‘we don’t have enough money.” While some bodies were collected for burial, with mourners weeping and praying over the coffins, the remains of quite 20 badly charred corpses required DNA tests to spot them.
In April, an identical explosion at a Baghdad Covid-19 hospital killed a minimum of 82 and injured 110.
The head of Iraq’s semi-official Human Rights Commission said Monday’s blast showed how ineffective safety measures still were during a health system crippled by war and sanctions.
“To have such a tragic incident repeated a few months later means still no (sufficient) measures are taken to stop them,” Ali Bayati said.
