Pakistan hospital fire that killed 14 babies lacked basic fire safety systems

On the morning of August 26, a fire broke out in the neonatal unit of Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences hospital in Islamabad. Fourteen babies died. One survived. An official inquiry released weeks later would reveal that the ward where they slept had no smoke detectors, no fire alarms, no sprinkler system—nothing to warn of danger or slow its spread.

The fire began as an electrical spark in an air conditioning unit, authorities determined. The cables had been overheating. The hospital's air conditioning system had been approved for replacement and upgrade back in 2018, but eight years later, nothing had changed. When the spark ignited, it found plastic equipment, medical supplies, oxygen tanks, and babies—many of them premature, many of them dependent on machines to breathe. The fire spread in seconds. Within a minute, according to security footage reviewed by investigators, dense smoke had filled the corridor so completely that the camera could no longer see through it.

A nurse named Razia Noreen rushed into the ward and emerged with one infant—the only one she would manage to save. Another witness, Abdul Ghafoor, was in a nearby ward when he heard shouts of warning. He ran upstairs to help. "The entire ward was filled with smoke, we could not see anything," he told the BBC. He and a group of seven or eight others tried to clear the smoke by breaking glass panels at the end of the corridor. They were working blind, moving through darkness and heat, trying to do something, anything, while the fire consumed the room.

But there was another barrier between the rescuers and the babies. The doors to the neonatal ward were locked. Hospital administrators had locked them for security reasons—to prevent baby abductions, a problem that had occurred at other government hospitals. When firefighters arrived, they could not simply walk through. They had to break windows to enter the building. Once inside, they encountered more locked doors blocking the path to the ward. A firefighter who spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity described what he found once the blaze was extinguished: "The medical equipment above the babies had melted and collapsed onto them. It was difficult for me to even describe what we saw."

The official inquiry, led by a retired senior civil servant, found what it called "systemic and institutional failure." The hospital had no evacuation plan for the neonatal unit. Staff had never been trained on how to evacuate newborns. No one had ever practiced what to do if a fire started. Staff did not know how to isolate the oxygen supply in an emergency. The hospital had received a warning just one month earlier when a fire broke out at its nursing hostel, raising the same issues—no smoke detection, no alarms, no fire preparedness. The hospital did nothing.

The report was direct about responsibility: "The hospital and its senior management bear the principal institutional responsibility for failing to convert known risks, prior warnings and assigned duties into an effective safety system." What had begun as an electrical defect in an air conditioner became, in the words of the inquiry, a "catastrophe"—because the systems that should have contained it, warned of it, or allowed people to escape it simply did not exist.

Pakistan's prime minister responded by ordering the inquiry's recommendations implemented within three months. He suspended eight officials and directed criminal proceedings against them. He ordered fire safety audits of public and private buildings across the country. Whether these measures will prevent another such fire, whether the hospital will finally replace its air conditioning units, whether doors will remain unlocked when lives depend on it—these are questions that will take time to answer. For now, fourteen families know what happens when a hospital fails to prepare for the dangers it knows exist.