Five people were killed, including two children, and one person was injured in a fire that broke out in a building in Miaoli County early yesterday, the county’s Fire Bureau said.
A report of a fire on Zhonghua Road in Toufen (頭份) was received at about 2:12am, said Lin Yu-hsing (林育興), deputy chief of the bureau’s Third Fire Control and Rescue Group.
Firefighters were immediately dispatched to the site, where they found a three-story building in flames, Lin said, adding that there was a Vietnamese restaurant on the first floor.
Photo copied by Tsai Cheng-min, Taipei Times
Two males and three females were pulled from the building’s second and third floors, but all of them had gone into cardiac arrest. All efforts to resuscitate them failed.
Two of the deceased were children aged five and eight, the bureau said.
It did not provide any further information about the three other people who died.
The injured person was a Vietnamese woman, who sprained her ankle after she jumped from a third-floor window to escape the fire.
The fire was extinguished at 3:48am, the bureau said, adding that the cause of the fire was still under investigation.
Neighbors said that the restaurant was run by a woman who lived in the building with three of her family members.
They said they heard loud noises for about 20 minutes before smoke was seen coming from the building.
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