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The city has requested district authorities to review all apartments for rent, especially mini-apartment buildings, to see if they have followed all protocols on fire prevention and fighting, Secretary of Hanoi's Party Committee, Dinh Tien Dung, said Wednesday.
The move has been made following a deadly fire at a mini-apartment building in an alley of Khuong Ha Street in Thanh Xuan District. It was officially confirmed on Wednesday night that 56 people have been killed and 37 others are injured. Of the victims, 10 were children.
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The mini apartment that caught fire killing 56 people in Hanoi's Thanh Xuan District on September 13, 2023. Photo by VnExpress/Gia Chinh |
Speaking to the press, Dung said the city considers the fire a "particularly serious accident."
He said the building on fire has 45 apartments and its owner, Nghiem Quang Minh, 44, only has an ownership certificate for the entire building. All the 45 apartments have no such certificate.
The building has passed a fire safety inspection.
Mini-apartment buildings, which are popular in big and crowded cities such as Hanoi and HCMC, are those with more than two stories. They comprise many small apartments that share the same stairs and elevators.
Bui Xuan Thai, an expert at the Vietnam Fire and Rescue Association, said in most cases, owners of those buildings only obtain the construction license for just one building and make sure that the building passes a fire safety inspection before they modify it to create many apartments for rent.
Vu Ngoc Anh, head of the Science, Technology and Environment Department under the Ministry of Construction, said Thursday that currently local authorities licensed the construction of mini-apartment buildings and were also in charge of inspecting their technical design.
He also confirmed that many people had deliberately modified multi-story buildings to create smaller apartments for sale or for rent, adding that the ministry would investigate those cases to manage violations.
In 2018, Hanoi's Construction Department requested district authorities to build a file of all mini-apartment buildings in their localities, but until now, the specific number of those buildings in the city is unknown.
The latest mini-apartment fire in Hanoi is now the deadliest fire to occur in Vietnam in 21 years after the fire at the ITC shopping mall in HCMC killed 60 people in 2002.
Fire police climb up an apartment building in Hanoi's Thanh Xuan District to rescue people from a fire, September 13, 2023. Video by VnExpress/Gia Chinh
