Fire at condominium traps family in bedroom
UPDATE: Police have confirmed that one of the family members, 68-year-old Alvin Ng Swee Seng, died at hospital this afternoon.
A family was trapped when a fire broke out at their Hillview Green condominium unit this morning.
The pre dawn fire raged though the family's seventh storey unit.
A resident residing on the 4th storey, Mr Han CK, said the fire engulfed the unit quickly, and trapped the family in a bedroom.
The rest of the block's residents had to be evacuated.
"The residents who vacated the building couldn't do anything to help the family ," Mr Han, 62, told The New Paper this morning.
"After evacuating, nobody was going to let us go back up. The fire had blocked their main door so they couldn't even make a dash out," he added.
Said Mr Han:
"After my family and I evacuated the building, I looked up and saw how big the fire was," Mr Han, who works in the shipping industry, added.
"It was horrifying."
It is believed that a set of elderly parents, two sons, their wives, two children and two maids lived in the unit.
Three of them managed to escape the unit prior to the arrival of the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF).
The rest of the seven occupants were subsequently rescued from the bedrooms of the unit by SCDF firefighters.
SCDF said in a statement that the elderly couple were taken to Singapore General Hospital for burn injuries.
Residents at Hillview Green said the elderly man's burn injuries looked severe.
SCDF also confirmed that three adults and the two children were taken to the National University Hospital while the other two adults were taken to Ng Teng Fong General Hospital for smoke inhalation.
The remaining occupant of the unit refused to be taken to hospital.
The cause of the fire is being investigated.
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