Hwaseong Battery Plant Fire Leaves 22 Dead, 8 Injured

The fire that broke out Monday at a lithium battery production plant in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province has left 22 people dead and eight others injured. 

According to fire authorities, many of the killed are foreigners, including 18 Chinese and one Laotian. 

Just some 20 minutes after the fire broke out at around 10:30 a.m., authorities proactively issued a Level Two alert requiring up to seven fire stations to mobilize a maximum 50 units of firefighting equipment. 

Authorities said the main fire was extinguished at around 3:10 p.m., adding that efforts are still under way to put out residual flames. 

The fire is said to have started on the second floor of one of the eleven concrete steel buildings in the plant that sits on a plot of land measuring some 55-hundred square meters.  

Authorities said firefighters faced difficulty in the early stages of extinguishing the fire as lithium was stored in the building that caught fire. 

The labor ministry has set up an industrial accident response headquarters and is assisting efforts to put out the fire.