Blaze at COVID intensive care unit killed 82, injured 110
Updated 28 April 2021
AP
BAGHDAD: It was a night of unimaginable horror as flames engulfed the intensive care unit of a Baghdad hospital — deafening screams, a patient jumping to his death to escape the inferno and relatives staying by their loved ones, refusing to abandon coronavirus patients tethered to ventilators.
Iraqi doctors, medical staff and rescue workers who witnessed the first moments of the catastrophic blaze described the scenes, many overcome by trauma and saying that night is forever seared in their memory.
The fire, which erupted late Saturday at the Ibn Al-Khatib Hospital’s coronavirus ward, raged for hours before claiming 82 lives and injuring 110 people. The death toll could still climb, with many of those hurt listed in serious condition.
Officials said the blaze was set off by exploding oxygen cylinders; days later, speculation has run rampant about what caused them to explode. Authorities have yet to issue the results of an official investigation.
Iraq, a nation toughened by decades of dictatorship, war and sectarian conflict — and now struggling to cope with the pandemic — remains in shock. Senior health officials have been fired or suspended amid allegations of negligence.
Sabah Samer, a doctor, and Yousif Hussein, a paramedic, were among the first to charge toward the blaze to try and help the victims. They say the hospital was a firetrap, especially the COVID-19 ward.
“The fire spread so quickly because of the combustible oxygen cylinders,” said Samer. “The walls of the rooms were padded with plastic and nylon, which fed the fire.”
He said he remembers the cylinders exploding one after another for almost every minute that he was inside, with flames shooting through the hospital windows. He said he counted at least 20 explosions.
HIGHLIGHT
Many have since pointed to blatant shortcomings in the hospital’s safety measures. Fire extinguishers did not work and emergency exits were inexplicably shut.
Samer and other rescuers said it was impossible to reach many of the patients — they could hear screams and pleas for help from the second floor of the hospital.
One patient, a nurse with COVID-19, jumped through the window to his death, his body in flames. His charred remains were retrieved from the hospital courtyard later, Samer said.
Many have since pointed to blatant shortcomings in the hospital’s safety measures. Fire extinguishers did not work and emergency exits were inexplicably shut.
Dr. Kamal Al-Rubaie, 28, was on the hospital’s second floor ICU ward, filled with COVID-19 patients on oxygen when the fire started. He was about to offer condolences to the family after one of his patients had died when he saw the first spark.
He said he had feared the oxygen cylinders ever since his first rotation at the ward last October. Each room inside the respiratory care unit typically stored over a dozen cylinders, with each patient needing between two to three a day. There were 30 patients in the unit at the time, he said.
In the day-to day patient care, there weren’t enough hospital staff to check that each cylinder was functioning properly. The task often fell on untrained relatives of patients, Al-Rubaie said. Other doctors who have worked at the hospital said the same.
Iranians fleeing cities under attack seek refuge in the countryside
Tens of thousands of Iranians are fleeing Tehran and other cities as Israeli and US bombardment spreads fear
he UN refugee agency says that about 100,000 people left the Iran’s capital Tehran in the war’s first two days and that the level of displacement is surely much higher by now
Updated 5 sec ago
AP
BEIRUT: Terrified by explosions shaking their homes in Tehran and other cities, tens of thousands of Iranians have packed up and left, finding refuge in small, remote towns to wait out massive bombardment by Israel and the United States. Pouya Akhgari, 22, is holed up in a family house with aunts and cousins in a village 200 kilometers (120 miles) from his home in the capital, Tehran. As snow falls in the mountainous countryside of Zanjan province, he mostly spends his days watching movies and TV shows and sometimes ventures out to the nearest main town. The village has been spared strikes, but Akhgari’s friends in Tehran tell him about the blasts all around them. “It just feels so chaotic. I thought it’d be very short but it’s dragging on,” he told The Associated Press by a messaging app. ”If it goes on like this, we’ll run out of money.” The UN refugee agency said that in the first two days of the war, about 100,000 people fled Tehran, a city of around 9.7 million. It said that the scale of displacement is likely much higher, though it didn’t have figures for the days since, or on the flight from other cities. A strawberry farm’s relative safety A 39-year-old lawyer endured a day of explosions that shook her home in the city of Ahvaz, 800 kilometers (500 miles) southeast of Tehran. The next day, on March 2, she packed up her things and hit the road with her brother, sister and their families — and their dogs Coco and Maggie. They went to their family’s strawberry farm in a small town several hours away. She and others reached by the AP spoke on condition of anonymity to prevent reprisals, and she asked that the town not be identified. The town doesn’t have any military bases, so it feels relatively safe. Still, southern Iran has been the target of some of the most intense bombardment. She said that the next town over — which is even smaller — saw an explosion when a strike hit an ammunition site belonging to the Revolutionary Guard, the nation’s most powerful armed force. She worries that strikes could target a gym used by Guard members a few hundred meters down the road from their farm. Airstrikes have hit a number of sports facilities around Iran, apparently because the Guard often uses such sites as gathering places. The gym is probably far enough away that it won’t affect them if it’s hit, she said, “but all the same, the danger exists.” No one is going to work, and the kids are far from school. To pass the time and keep their minds off things, they walk the dogs, play board games and pick strawberries. The peacefulness of the nature around them helps make the war feel distant — the clouds rolling across the green hills, the bleating of their neighbor’s goats at sunset. The brightest spot, the lawyer said, was when one of the two farm dogs, Maya, gave birth to a litter of puppies. Still, uncertainty hangs over everything. “From morning to night, we talk about what is happening, our worries, how everything gets more expensive every day, about how far our money will stretch,” she said. “If this situation continues, we will have problems meeting basic needs.” Between bombardment and the Revolutionary Guard The US-Israeli campaign has struck heavy blows to Iran’s leadership, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and top military figures. It has also particularly targeted the Revolutionary Guard and paramilitary Basij, the forces that are tasked with protecting the cleric-led Islamic Republic and that have led the crushing of waves of anti-government protests, including ones in January, The leadership has kept its hold. Khamenei’s son, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, was named the new supreme leader this week. The Guard and Basij have shown that their local networks are still in place so far. The lawyer said that on the rare times she left the farm to go into town, she saw that members of the Basij were now more heavily armed in the streets. “They are waiting for the slightest movement” showing dissent, she said. She once campaigned against the mandatory hijab — in fact, she was briefly detained in the past — and stopped wearing it years ago. But since the war, she wears one when she leaves home for fear of provoking the Basij. The town is traditionally considered pro-government, she said, and many residents have taken state positions or joined the Guard. Religious and patronage loyalties run deep in rural areas in particular, since the Islamic Republic brought basic services to Iran’s countryside and small towns. Still, she has seen signs of growing discontent even here. Large crowds turned out in the town for January’s anti-government protests, she said, and observance of the state’s official mourning week for Khamenei has been muted, with few people wearing black as urged by authorities. The ‘remarkable kindness’ of strangers One man described how, before fleeing home in Tehran, explosions made his 6½-year-old son tremble in fear. “You place him between you and your wife in bed, hoping he might feel safer,” he said, but he still screamed in his sleep. They decided it was time to leave. As they drove through the capital, they saw cars on the roadside, their windows shattered from blasts. Leaving the city at the foothills of the Alborz Mountains north of Tehran, they saw columns of smoke rising from different parts of the city into the overcast sky. “The scene made the city look frightening,” he said. On the highway west out of Tehran, heavy with traffic, explosions shook their car, terrifying his son, he said. Finally they reached a family home in a small village on the other side of the mountains, northwest of the capital, overlooking the Caspian Sea. There they spend their days in the house, surrounded by rice paddies, with snow-capped mountains in the distance. Each day, he and his wife take their son out for walks. “Boys have so much energy, and in a village, there is not much fun for him,” he said. In the evenings, his wife’s mother and father, who also fled Tehran, visit. Amid all the chaos, local residents show “remarkable kindness,” he said. He said he went to the neighborhood bakery to buy bread and found a long line. When the baker realized he wasn’t from the area, he called him to the front of the line, then tried to refuse payment for the bread. “The others in line were very friendly, asking whether I had a place to stay and whether I needed anything,” he said. Leaving home isn’t an option for everyone. One 53-year-old man in Tehran said that he can’t move his elderly parents and so is staying home. The strain is immense, he said. “At night, I go down to the parking garage, sit inside my car and scream out loud,” he said. “I pray for calm and for quieter days.”
