Probe into fatal store fire

Press, 10 May 1979, Page 1

Probe into fatal store fire

NZPA Manchester Police and fire experts yesterday started a detailed search of the Woolworth’s store in Manchester which was swept by fire on Tuesday. Nine persons died in the fire and a tenth died after being knocked down in traffic as he escaped from the blazing building in Manchester’s busy Piccadilly commercial and shopping centre. Early yesterday only three of the dead had been named, two of them women customers and the third a Woolworths storeman.

The four-storey building was crowded with lunchtime customers when the fire broke out. Chief - Superintendent Alan Robinson, who is leading the inquiry into the blaze, said that the investigation could take a week or more, A total of 48 persons including three firemen, was taken to hospital. Three persons were admitted and were later said to be comfortable. Yesterday police began to interview all 150 members of the store’s staff. The heroine of the blaze was a pretty, blond secur-

ity officer, Virginia Morgan, aged 20, who guided frightened shoppers to safety and rescued the store’s general manager. She is a former policewoman who joined Woolworths in March. She said, “I was on the escalator between the first and second floors. Once I saw flames I got the escalator stopped and got people back down to the first floor, “I tried to get up to the second floor to try to get the people down but it was impossible. The smoke was so thick it was

like night. I could hear people screaming.” Some women were trapped behind the barred windows of the cash office and had to be cut free by firemen who sawed through the bars. They used their bare hands to break the windows but had to wait in terror until the firemen had cut their way through. Some of the women were badly cut, blood dripping down on to the yellow helmets of the firemen below. Twenty persons were rescued from the roof of the building.