Shanghai high-rise blaze kills 53

A high-rise apartment building under renovation in Shanghai erupted in flames Monday, killing 53 people and injuring 90, the official New China News Agency said.

A witness said the blaze started when building materials caught fire and spread up scaffolding surrounding the 28-story tower, the news agency reported.

Firefighters facing difficulty reaching the upper levels set up hoses on top of an adjacent building to finally contain the blaze, which raged for more than four hours.

Rescuers were seen carrying survivors out of the building. Earlier attempts to airlift people off the roof with helicopters had to be called off because of thick smoke.

One resident said he and his wife climbed down to safety on the scaffolding from the 23rd floor, where their apartment was, according to the Xinmin Evening Post, a local newspaper.

The man, who identified himself as a retired teacher with the surname Zhou, said he was napping when he was awakened by smoke. He said he rushed through his front door into the hallway and uncoiled a fire hose to extinguish flames next to a window by a stairwell. He and his wife were then able to flee, the newspaper said.

Another survivor, Li Xiuyun, 61, said she hurried down stairs inside the building with her husband, son and granddaughter from their home on the 16th floor, cutting her feet on shattered glass along the way.

“The smoke was very strong and the glass from the windows was scalding,” she told the Agence France-Presse news service.

“My son took off his socks and soaked them with water, and we used them to cover our noses. I stumbled on people on the floor when walking,” she said at one of the nine hospitals that took in victims.

China’s minister of public security, Meng Jianzhu, rushed to Shanghai and called for a thorough investigation through the State Council, the country’s Cabinet, the New China News Agency said.

Crews were installing insulation at the time of the fire, the Associated Press reported.

“Construction workers used to litter cigarette butts all around in the building,” said a woman surnamed Zhao, the New China News Agency reported. She said she had filed several complaints about the fire hazard.

The 156-unit building, which was built in the late 1990s, housed mainly retired teachers and is in the center of the modern metropolis. Thick black plumes of smoke could be seen over the Shanghai skyline for miles.

Although China has been undergoing a construction boom for many years, building safety has remained controversial.

Last year, firefighters could do little to stop a massive blaze in a nearly completed Beijing skyscraper housed in the same complex as China’s state television headquarters. The building, slated to be a luxury hotel, burned after being set alight by an illegal fireworks show.

Critics also point to substandard construction practices as a major source of safety problems.

They cite the collapse of thousands of buildings, including many shoddily built schools, during the deadly 2008 Sichuan earthquake as a prime example of the poor construction common to much of China.

The following year, a nearly completed 13-story apartment tower in Shanghai toppled, killing one worker in a high-profile incident that attracted stunned onlookers for days because the building remained largely intact on its side.

Chinese have come to call buildings constructed poorly for the sake of cutting costs “tofu dregs,” a reference to the mushy curds left behind in the tofu-making process.

david.pierson@latimes.com

Tommy Yang of The Times’ Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.