“Some threw themselves into the void”… Hotel fire in Türkiye leaves dozens dead

In a ski resort in central Turkey, a hotel caught fire in the middle of the night on Tuesday, January 21, leaving at least 66 dead and 51 injured.

In this hotel apparently without an alarm system, a fire suddenly broke out during the night from Monday to Tuesday, killing at least 66 people and injuring 51, announced Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya. The building, located in the Kartalkaya station, 170 kilometers northwest of Ankara, Turkey, leans against a cliff, which complicates the intervention of firefighters dispatched to the site.

According to Tanju Ozcan, the mayor of Bolu (capital of the province of the same name), on which the Kartalkaya station depends, the fire was still brought under control at the end of the morning. But the drama is still not over since local authorities now fear the collapse of the ten-story building.

While a previous report in the morning reported 10 dead and 32 injured, “the number of deaths in the hotel fire rose to sixty-six. 51 people were injured, including one seriously.” said the minister after visiting the site. But the toll could rise further with continued excavations in the rubble.

The silence of alarms and detectors

Four people, including the owner of the establishment, were arrested according to the Minister of Justice, Yilmaz Tunc, who also visited the site. The cause of the disaster is not yet known but anger is growing among the survivors, considering “the negligence” of which they were victims, according to them. And for good reason: the fire broke out at 3:30 a.m. (1:30 a.m. in Paris) in total silence.

“No alarm went off, no smoke detector or emergency staircase even though there was smoke up to the tenth floor,” a crying fifty-year-old, who had been with his family since Sunday, denounced on television in the establishment. Faced with these declarations, the Minister of the Interior promised that “all measures will be taken if the investigation shows that there has been negligence or that mistakes have been made”.

At the forefront of this tragedy, customers saw the flames quickly spread to the rest of the building due to the wooden cladding, Turkish media reported. In the images, fire and plumes of black smoke escape from the upper windows and the roof during the intervention of the 428 firefighters mobilized on site since 4:15 a.m., underlines the Minister of the Interior.

“People were calling for help”

For their part, hotel employees helped, as best they could, with the evacuation of guests. “People were calling for help, asking for blankets so they could get out through the windows,” said Baris Salgur, an employee at a nearby hotel.

“We brought them what we found, ropes, pillows, and even a sofa… When the flames approached them, some threw themselves into the void,” he added. In total, at least three people died jumping out of windows according to the private television channel NTV.

Faced with the scale of the disaster, the Minister of Justice announced that an investigation had been entrusted to “six prosecutors”, supported by a committee of experts. In front of his formation, the AKP, meeting in congress, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, also assured that “everything will be done to shed light on all aspects of the tragedy and to hold those responsible to account.”