Facility in Deadly Blaze Was a Firetrap

A state-run home for the disabled where 19 patients died in a midnight blaze was made of highly flammable material and should have been torn down years ago, Italian authorities said Sunday.

The victims were all the more vulnerable because of their ailments and their isolation. All suffered from mental illnesses or motor neuron disease, which would have made it hard for them to react to any emergency, and their facility in rural southern Italy was 45 miles from the nearest fire department.

The two nurses on duty were unable to call for help but managed to save the home’s 10 other residents. The area, in the southern Apennine mountains, is outside mobile phone range, and the building’s only regular telephone was cut off by the flames, Italian state television reported.

Firefighters, summoned from the city of Salerno by a motorist who saw the blaze, said they found 11 men and eight women dead, some of them in their beds. “When we arrived, there was no one to save,” firefighter Rosario Pizzirusso told state television.

Instead, the firefighters labored in a snowstorm to recover the 19 bodies and place them in coffins. Nine of the surviving patients and two rescue workers were treated for burns and smoke inhalation.

Politicians in Rome called for an investigation into how Italy’s health care system, rated last year by the United Nations as the second most effective in a 191-country survey, could have put patients in such jeopardy. President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi said he was “deeply saddened by the terrible tragedy.”

Municipal authorities in Buccino, the nearest town, ruled out arson. They said the blaze, which started just after midnight, apparently resulted from an electrical short and spread rapidly through the home’s prefabricated units. Firefighters told state TV that parts of the structure were made of a flammable resin material.

France donated the building, along with others, for emergency housing after a 1980 earthquake destroyed hundreds of homes in the area. The prefabricated structures were meant to be temporary. But despite millions of dollars in government spending on reconstruction, many people still live in them.

The structure that burned down had been operating as a state-run care facility since 1997. Its 29 resident patients ranged in age from 30 to 67.