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The blaze, which also injured at least one resident, broke out
after midnight in the building, which was mostly made of wood,
as people slept in San Isidro Galas village in suburban Quezon
city, officials said.
An investigation was underway to determine the cause of the
fire.
Two of the dead were found on the ground floor and the bodies of
six others were recovered on the second floor, where the fire
apparently started, senior fire officer Rolando Valeña told The
Associated Press, citing witnesses.
Beverly Salvador, 33, said that she, her husband and two
children scrambled to escape from their third-floor room by
crawling out of a small window in their bathroom as the flames
and thick suffocating smoke spread quickly through the lower
floors in a near-death experience. They landed on the roof of a
neighboring house.
“I opened our door and saw that the corridor and the stairway
going down were already in flames, so I asked my husband to find
another way out,” Salvador told the AP. She added that she wept
after learning that two families, which were longtime friends,
all perished on the second floor.
The blaze happened just two days before the Philippines marks
fire-prevention month in March, when the government launches an
annual campaign to raise awareness about fire hazards before the
onset of the scorching summer season.
Many deadly fires in the Philippines have been blamed on poor
enforcement of safety regulations, overcrowding and faulty
building designs.
A 1996 disco fire in Quezon city killed 162 people, mostly
students celebrating the end of the school year, in one of the
deadliest nightclub fires in the world in recent decades. They
were unable to escape because the emergency exit was blocked by
a new building next door.
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