14 Dead, 12 Injured In Warehouse Fire In China: Reports

Beijing:

A warehouse fire in north-eastern China has left at least fourteen people dead and twelve seriously injured.

The fire consumed a logistics warehouse, located in Changchun, the capital of the north-eastern province of Jilin, and rescue work is still underway, the official Xinhua news agency has reported.

"The cause of the incident is under investigation," Xinhua said.

Images showed firefighters using ladders and cranes outside the burned-out shell of a glass-walled building.

Deadly fires are not uncommon in China, it is reported that lax enforcement of building codes and rampant unauthorised construction can make it hard for people to escape burning buildings.

A fire recently broke out at a martial arts boarding school in central China's Henan province killing 18 people in June this year – victims were mostly children studying at the school, and state media later reported that the school building had not completed mandatory fire safety audits.

The school fire prompted an online uproar, with Chinese social media users calling for better fire safety standards.

In 2017, more than two dozen people were killed in two blazes in Beijing's migrant neighbourhoods.

The first, which killed 19 people in November that year, prompted authorities to begin tearing down unsafe buildings in the capital, driving hundreds of thousands of residents out of their homes in the middle of winter.

In 2010, a huge blaze swept a 28-storey Shanghai residential block, killing 58 people.

(Except for the headline, this story has been part edited by Powell & Barns Media staff and was originally published from a syndicated feed.)