AFP The eleven people who died slept on the top floor
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 17:31
The holiday home in the French Alsace in which eleven people died in a fire yesterday had not undergone a fire safety inspection. It should have been, says the Public Prosecution Service in the city of Colmar, which is leading the investigation.
“If you want to drive a car, you need a driver’s license. If you want to accommodate people, you have to go through a committee that points out the safety rules,” the prosecutor said.
The holiday home in the town of Wintzenheim was a recently converted old barn with a ground floor of stone and an upper floor with lots of wood. If the inspection committee had come to look, it would have checked whether the doors were fire-resistant, whether a fire alarm was present and whether the escape route was marked with arrows, the officer said.
The investigation is still ongoing, but the initial investigation showed that there were not enough smoke detectors. The investigators do not yet know whether fire extinguishers were present.
Cause
The fire started at 06:30 yesterday morning on the top floor. It is still unclear what caused the fire and how the fire spread quickly.
People with a mild intellectual disability and their companions were sleeping in the house. Twelve people were on the ground floor and sixteen on the upper floor. They came from Nancy and Besançon. The eleven people who died – ten people with disabilities and an attendant – were on the top floor.
The owner is in shock. She lives opposite the building. She was the one who raised the alarm. She has not been arrested, partly because the cause of the fire has not yet been determined.
2023-08-10 15:31:25
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