Bucharest: A fire broke out Friday morning at a hospital in Romania’s port city of Constanta, leaving at least nine people dead. The toll may go up as a number of people are still missing, authorities said. All the patients have been evacuated from the hospital in Constanta and the fire had been extinguished by mid-morning, Romania’s emergency situations inspectorate said.
The Romanian health ministry said in a statement that more details will be given at a news conference at an unspecified time. It said that 113 patients were in the medical unit of the hospital, 10 of whom were in intensive care units.
Romania, a European Union country of 19 million, has had two other deadly hospital fires within the past year, which has raised concerns about the country’s ageing hospital infrastructure.
Last November, 10 people died after a fire tore through an intensive care unit for Covid-19 patients in the northern town of Piatra Neamt. Another blaze in January engulfed a ward at Bucharest’s Matei Bals hospital, killing at least five people.
After the Matei Bals fire, President Klaus Iohannis called for urgent and ‘profound’ reform. He said tragedies like it ‘must not happen again’.