DAVAO—At least 37 people, including call center staff from an American firm, are believed to have perished in a fire that tore through a shopping mall in Davao City, local authorities said on Sunday.
President Rodrigo Duterte, himself a Davao native, visited distraught relatives outside the burning building overnight Saturday but told them there was “zero” chance their loved ones had survived, witnesses said.
The fire brought fresh misery after a tropical storm killed at least 182 people and displaced tens of thousands in recent days, also mainly in the country’s south.
The blaze started at the four-story NCCC Mall on Saturday morning sending thick plumes of black smoke billowing into the sky over Davao.
The inferno was finally brought under control early Sunday but fire officials said they had yet to enter the section where the missing were believed to be trapped.
The building’s top floor housed a 24-hour call center for US multinational SSI, a market research company.
Jimmy Quimsing, a retired seaman, was one of the relatives desperately waiting for news.
His 25-year-old son Jim Benedict worked at the call center and had not been in contact since the fire broke out.
Quimsing said he spoke to President Duterte and had been told to prepare for the worst.
“He told us zero, no one would survive under these circumstances,” he said.
Duterte’s special assistant Christopher Go confirmed the bulk of the conversation.
Paolo Duterte, the President’s son and the vice mayor of Davao, also wrote on Facebook that fire officials had told him there was “zero” chance of anyone trapped surviving the blaze.
In a statement on its local Facebook page SSI Philippines Davao said it would set up a “command center” for relatives of those missing.
“Please continue to pray for everyone’s safety,” the firm added.
Davao fire marshal Honeyfritz Alagano said the blaze may have started with a spark on the third floor of the mall, which boasted a furniture section.
“One of our firemen here has a kid who is a [call center] agent in there. He told us some of them went to collect their stuff at their lockers and were trapped,” Alagano said.
“The mall is an enclosed space with no ventilation. When our firemen tried to enter they were pushed back by smoke and fire,” she said.
“It’s possible that while they were working, they did not immediately notice the fire spreading,” Davao police officer Ralph Canoy said, referring to the call center workers.
Authorities recovered one charred body inside the comfort room of the fourth floor of the NCCC mall more than 24 hours after fire engulfed the building.
Mayor Sara Duterte said firefighters were unable to enter the fourth floor call center because of the scorching heat from the flames.
“They were just meters away from the SSI office, but they could not enter because of the heat,” she said.
The Palace on Sunday condoled with the families of the fire victims.
President Duterte and Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines president Archbishop Romulo Valles visited the relatives of the victims on Sunday.
The President assured the relatives that the government would extend them help.
“Our thoughts and prayers to the families and friends of the 37 missing persons of the New City Commercial Center [NCCC] fire in Davao City,” Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque said in a statement.
“Let us include them in our prayers in this moment of grief,” Roque said.
The Bureau of Fire Protection is still determining the cause of the fire and the extent of the damage, Roque said.
The President served as mayor of Davao for more than two decades and continues to go home there on weekends from his work at the presidential palace in Manila.
There have also been horrific fires in bigger buildings and factories, where corruption and exploitation mean supposedly strict standards are often not enforced.
Seventy-two people were killed in 2015 when a fire tore through a footwear factory in Manila. Survivors of that blaze blamed barred windows and other sweatshop conditions for trapping people inside the factory.
In the deadliest fire in the Philippines in recent times, 162 people were killed in a huge blaze that gutted a Manila disco in 1996. With John Paolo Bencito and AFP