Six residents of a nursing home have died and more than 80 injured in a fire in Milan, northern Italy, today, local firefighters said.
“Six people died and many were taken to hospital due to smoke inhalation. Dozens of other residents were rescued by firefighters,” the Lombardy capital’s fire department said on Twitter, adding that the cause of the fire was not yet known.
According to Italian news agencies, 81 people were injured, two of them seriously.
The mayor of Milan, Giuseppe Sala, who went to the site in the early hours of the morning, explained that due to the health condition of the residents, they had to be removed “one by one”.
“It could have been worse, but six deaths is still too many and we hope that the two people who were hospitalized and are in critical condition will not be added,” Sala said.
The alarm was raised by the service personnel, which allowed the fire to be contained, as only one room was affected, but the problem was smoke, which quickly spread throughout the house.
Two of the patients were hospitalized in the red, the most severe, while the rest had milder symptoms.
As for the causes, “the main hypothesis is that a fire was accidental, but everything is not decided yet,” the firefighters explained to the media.
The residence is owned by the municipality and operated by the Proges Cooperative, which controls 300 centers of this type in 11 districts and welcomes the elderly with different levels of dependency, but without the need for hospital care.
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