Eleven people died on Friday, August 2, 2024, in a fire that tore through a five-storey building in Binondo, Manila’s Chinatown. The building held homes and shops.
Fire responders were alerted at about 7:30 a.m. It took roughly three hours to get the flames out. Officials had no word yet on what started them.
“The wife of the building owner was among those that died,” Nelson Ty, an elected official for the community, told radio station DZRH. He said vendors had been storing their goods in the structure overnight.
Ty could not say whether anyone else was still trapped and feared dead.
A record of deadly fires
Fire safety enforcement in the Philippines has a patchy record in homes, offices and other buildings. The list of earlier disasters is long. Sixteen people died in a fire at a residential and warehouse building in August 2023. That May, flames engulfed the capital’s historic Central Post Office. And in 2017, a fire at a shopping mall in Davao City killed 37 call centre agents and a security officer.
