Police officers outside a school dormitory after a fire on Saturday in central Henan Province in China.Credit…Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The private school is for kids in kindergarten and elementary school. Although many details about the disaster were not clear, it got a lot of interest on China’s internet.
On Saturday, Chinese state-owned news media report that a fire in a dormitory at a kindergarten and elementary school in central China killed 13 people.
Another person was hurt and is in the hospital after the fire started on Friday night, China Central Television reported. Firefighters came at 11 p.m., and they put out the fire by 11:38, the report said. It also said that the person in charge of the school was take by the police. The report didn’t say more, like if any kids were hurt.
A teacher from the school told Zonglan News, an online news outlet, that all the people who got hurt were in the same third-grade class. It didn’t say who the teacher was. Zonglan News is part of Hebei Daily Group, which is a government-owned newspaper.
We’re not sure if all the kids at the school live there, or how many beds the dormitory had. Nobody answere the phone when we called the school on Saturday morning, and the person who answered the phone at the police office nearby didn’t want to talk about the fire.
The news about the fire was the second most looked-up thing online, with 190 million views on Weibo, the most popular social media in China, on Saturday.
Lots of people online felt sorry for the families of the people who got hurt, and they wanted to know exactly what happened. ‘It’s so sad that this happened at a school that’s supposed to keep everyone safe,’ one person wrote.
Pictures of the dormitory in the news showed that there were metal bars on the windows. Some of the windows looked black because of the smoke, and one small part of the bars was open over an air conditioner.
The school, called Dushu Town Yingcai School, is in Fangcheng County in central Henan Province, and is owned by a private person. A few years ago, its official social media said it spent more than $1.4 million to make the school look nice. It’s on 35 acres of land with a playground for sports and a basketball court. The local leaders have said good things about the school.
The kindergarten costs $25 every month for kids to go, according to the local education website. People in Fangcheng County usually make about $3,372 a year, according to the government’s numbers from 2022.
Research contributions were made by Li You and Zixu Wang.
