North Macedonia Accepts Help in Investigating Deadly Hospital Fire

As country declares three days of mourning, government accepts offer from NATO allies of help in investigating the causes of the deadly blaze in Tetovo's modular COVID-19 hospital, which took 14 lives.

At Thursday’s emergency session, after Wednesday’s hospital inferno in the town of Tetovo, North Macedonia’s government decided to accept help offered by its NATO allies in investigating the cause of the fire that claimed the lives of 14 COVID patients.

The government “made a decision to accept the offer of some of the allied forces in NATO for seconding highest ranking experts in the field of fire investigations, so that they might help determine the causes of the fire,” a press release said.

Earlier, authorities said investigators and prosecutors from the western town of Tetovo and from the capital, Skopje, were already on the ground, while coroners in Skopje are working to confirm the identities of some of the severely burned bodies.

The Health Ministry on Thursday said that at the time of the fire, 26 patients were in the modular hospital, which was designed to host up to 35 patients. Apart from the fatalities, 12 patients were rescued from the blaze and sent to the hospital’s emergency section, where their lives are now out of danger.

The Tetovo fire department said that when its team arrived on the spot, the fire was already blazing but that they got it under control relatively quickly, in about 30 minutes, while, along with local health workers, they were already pulling bodies of wounded and dead patients from the inside.

Authorities also reported several minor injuries among the medical staff that helped the firefighters in the rescue effort.

The decision to accept foreign help in investigating the fire comes as questions about the cause of the fire and speculation about possible omissions during construction, are being raised.

The modular COVID-19 hospital was built earlier this year in the courtyard of the existing Tetovo hospital and started operations on April 15.

The facility, linked to the hospital’s main building, was built in parallel with 18 other such modular hospitals in other towns, in order to expand the capacities of the health system to hospitalize COVID-19 patients.

Last year, two local firms, “Brako” from Veles and “Ari I Tom”, won bids to construct 17 of these hospitals. They were together paid some 3.6 million euros through a loan that the state took from the World Bank.

The Health Ministry on Thursday warned against speculating about the cause of the fire before the official investigation produces answers.

It insisted that “all of the 19 modular hospitals, including the one in Tetovo, opened after a proper technical reception”.

It said that the Tetovo modular hospital, and all the others, were built “according to the highest world standards”, and that only certified materials were used.

It said also that, for safety purposes, for example, the windows were made lower and the corridors were made 2.4 meters wide, to facilitate quick evacuation, and that no wood was used during construction.

Police officers securie the site of the deadly hospital fire in Tetovo where 14 patients died. Photo: EPA-EFE/Georgi Licovski

The “Brako” compnay, owned by Koco Angjushev, a former Deputy Prime Minister in PM Zoran Zaev’s government, issued a press release on Thursday saying that it had done all its work according to the highest safety and quality standards.

“Before the technical reception [of the modular hospitals] all work positions which were our responsibility, were tested and checked, for which there is evidence in the proper technical reception documents for the object, which was then handed into use, according to the rigorous standards of the Workld Bank, as a financier of the project,” the company wrote.

However, during its short period of operational use, the modular hospital made local headlines twice.

During its official start of use in April, the technical manager of the Tetovo Clinical Hospital, Artan Etemi, informed the media that they had noticed some omissions during construction and had asked the private firms to correct these mistakes.

On Thursday, however, in a statement for Focus news portal, Etemi said that he could not see how these mistakes, which he said were minor and were fixed, could have caused a fire.

“What I have noticed before cannot be put into relation to the fire. I determined minor irregularities, for example that the floor in the corridor needed fixing, that a shower cabin needed to be installed or that a protective fence was needed, which was all done,” Etemi said.

The second time this hospital was in the spotlight was following an incident in August 23.

Police were then summoned to investigate who had used force to damage two auxiliary pipes bringing air to patients in need of help in breathing. According to the authorities, no patients suffered due to this incident and the police later said they had apprehended one person suspected of damaging the pipes.

So far, there is nothing to indicate links between these two occurances with the fire.

During his visit to Tetovo on Thursday, President Stevo Pendarovski told media that from what he knew so far, there were no indications that the fire was planted.

The disaster struck North Macedonia just after the country held a grand celebration in the capital, Skopje, marking 30 years since the independence referendum of September 8, 1991. The Government and the town of Tetovo have declared three days of mourning.