Paris
CNN
—
At least 10 people, including five children, were killed in a massive fire early Friday morning in an eight-story apartment building outside the French city of Lyon.
Major Geoffrey Kass, spokesman for France’s National Federation of Firefighters, told French broadcaster LCI on Friday that a fire had broken out on the ground floor of a building in the town of Volks-en-Véran. Hell then engulfed the top three floors of the building, according to CNN affiliate BFMTV.
The frightened family was awakened from their beds by what one resident called a “apocalyptic” scene as the remains of their home engulfed in smoke and flames. In an interview with French radio station RTL, a resident said she and her husband kept her children under wet sheets to survive.
According to BFMTV, neighbors were awakened to confusion at 2:25 a.m. by the screams of parents and children screaming for help from their apartment balconies. Bystanders used the ladders they found and jumped in to help.
An ambulance was called at approximately 3:12 am and arrived 13 minutes later. About 170 firefighters and 65 fire engines were dispatched to the scene, according to local authorities. Inside, it was found that escape routes inside the building were blocked by smoke, forcing many family ladders to be reached.
A woman interviewed by RTL said her family tied up her bedsheets in an attempt to escape into the frigid winter darkness through a fifth-floor window because the exit appeared to be blocked. However, the risk turned out to be too great. They saw their neighbors die trying to escape like that.
The woman’s 4-year-old child appeared to pass out while they waited for emergency services.hope began to fade
“Perhaps we saw death before us,” she said.
![About 170 firefighters were dispatched to the scene early Friday morning.](https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/221216092251-03-lyon-fire-121622.jpg?c=16x9&q=h_270,w_480,c_fill)
The woman’s two children were eventually rescued by firefighters and lowered out the window using a mechanical bucket. She and her husband took refuge down a flight of stairs in a blinding black smoke.
“You couldn’t breathe. The firefighters were all red and we almost suffocated,” she said.
“It was awful, it was apocalyptic.”
By the time the fire was extinguished at 6am, four people were seriously injured and another 10 people, including two firefighters, were slightly injured in a fire in the town of Vaux-en-Vlan, the local authority of the Auvergne-Rhône. . – Alps said in a statement.
The children who died ranged from 3 to 15 years old, according to French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin.
“Obviously it’s a shock. The death toll is very serious,” Dalmanin told journalists. He and France’s housing minister, Olivier Klein, visited the site and met with first responders later in the day.
French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne called the incident “tragic” and offered solidarity and support to the victims and their loved ones.
It is not yet clear how the fire started. Local prosecutors said in a statement that an investigation had been launched to determine the exact cause of the fire.
A technical team of judicial police and forensic and fire experts are on site. Victim advocacy groups have also been mobilized, the statement said.
The governor of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, Pascal Mayos, the mayor of Vaux-en-Varane, Hélène Geoffrey, and the public prosecutor, Nicolas Jacquet, went to the scene of the incident, regional officials said.