At least 10 dead in massive apartment blaze in France

A fire tore through an apartment building in the early hours of Friday near Lyon in central France, killing at least 10 people, including five children, French authorities said.

Over 160 firefighters and more than 60 fire engines responded to the blaze, which started around 3 a.m. in a seven-floor building in Vaulx-en-Velin, a northeastern suburb of Lyon, the prefecture for the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region said in a statement.

Four people were also seriously hurt in the blaze, and 10 others, including two firefighters, suffered lighter injuries, the prefecture said. Firefighters managed to extinguish the fire, which started from the ground floor and spread up, filling the building’s communal areas with noxious smoke.

Authorities said that it was not immediately clear how the blaze had started.

Gérald Darmanin, the French interior minister, said the children killed in the fire were ages 3 to 15. Several of the people who were injured are still “between life and death,” and not all of the victims’ bodies have been identified, he added.

“Without the firefighters’ speed and heroism, the toll would have been far more tragic,” Darmanin told reporters in Vaulx-en-Velin after traveling to the site of the blaze.

He noted that firefighters arrived at the scene within 12 minutes of the first emergency call. Witnesses told local news outlets that several occupants had jumped out of windows to escape.

Prosecutors in Lyon have opened an investigation. “For the time being, no hypothesis is being ruled out, including the criminal one,” said Nicolas Jacquet, the Lyon prosecutor, in a statement.

An occupant of the building told the BFMTV news channel that his 10-year-old son woke him up around 3 a.m. when he heard screaming.

“There was a dad who was shouting, ‘My kids, my kids, save my kids,’” the resident, who was identified only as Rida, told the channel.

“It’s really tragic; it’s a shock; my legs are shaking,” he added. “We all know each other.”

Vaulx-en-Velin, northeast of Lyon, France’s third-biggest city, is a working-class suburb and one of the poorest towns in the region, with a poverty rate of 33%, according to official statistics.

Authorities had already taken steps to renovate both the building where the fire took place and the surrounding area, Le Mas du Taureau, and there were plans for more improvements. Le Mas du Taureau was the site of major urban riots in the 1990s.

The Lyon Metropolis, a local governing body that includes Vaulx-en-Velin, said in a statement that the building where the fire occurred was one of 13 “deteriorated” apartment complexes in the neighborhood.

Local authorities had approved a plan in January to “rehabilitate and assist in the management of each of the condominiums,” the statement said, but it did not draw a connection to the state of the building and the fire Friday morning.

On a visit to Vaulx-en-Velin in July, Élisabeth Borne, the French prime minister, promised that the government would do more to renovate low-income neighborhoods, many of which are run-down clusters of apartment blocks on the outskirts of major cities, marred by neglect and unemployment, and often home to large immigrant communities.

Olivier Klein, the French minister for housing, said Friday that emergency renovations had been carried out in 2019, but he did not specify what had been done, and he said that it was too early to say whether the state of the building had played a role in the fire.

“This is a neighborhood where urban redevelopment is ongoing,” Klein told reporters in Vaulx-en-Velin.

Authorities said that about 100 people had been had evacuated from about 30 apartments in the building and that they would be temporarily relocated.

“We are devastated,” Hélène Geoffroy, the mayor of Vaulx-en-Velin, told reporters at the scene. “This is a truly terrible ordeal.”