Deadly fire in Naantali home started in sauna
Five teenagers die in tragic end to party
Police and accident investigators believe that a fire at a home in the west coast city of Naantali in which five young people were killed and nine injured on Friday night started in the sauna section of the building. The actual cause of the fire, which broke out during a house party, remains unknown.
The alarm for the fire was raised on Friday evening at 23:42. Fire units reached the scene of the blaze in six minutes, but the wooden house built in 1975 was already engulfed in flames.
Eight of the nine who were injured have been released from hospital. The ninth, a 19-year-old man, is still being treated for burns.
The investigators are trying to offer a secure environment to debrief the survivors on the traumatic events. “We are moving forward with discretion. We cannot go charging in like an elephant into a china shop”, said Veli-Pekka Nurmi, chairman of the accident investigation board.
Nurmi says that it is important for the investigators to find out why the fire spread as fast as it did throughout the entire house. Nobody who was inside managed to escape the house unscathed. One possible explanation could be that the fire had smouldered in the wooden structures of the building, and suddenly flared up once there was enough oxygen.
Police and investigators have spoken with the survivors and with eyewitnesses.
“Based on information gleaned from the interviews, we can assume that there were a total of 14 people in the house before the fire broke out”, says the head of the police investigation, Veikko Koiranen.
The dead, who came from Naantali and from nearby Turku and Raisio, were between 15 and 18 years of age. The adults in the house were away at the time.
Koiranen and Nurmi say that the investigation at the scene of the fire will continue, and the interviews of the survivors are also ongoing.
Nurmi says that he is not yet at liberty to report on what the survivors have told the police.
Schools in Naantali are to offer pupils crisis counselling to help cope with the tragedy, which further blackens Finland's already grim statistics on house fire fatalities (see separate article).
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 12.10.2009 - TODAY |
 Deadly fire in Naantali home started in sauna |
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