RIO DE JANEIRO — A fire ripped through a small hotel in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre early Friday, killing at least 10 people and injuring 11, authorities said.
The fire broke out early in the morning in the three-story building, which offered affordable single-room housing and had a contract with the municipal government to house homeless people.
The establishment did not have the proper license and lacked an emergency fire plan, the Rio Grande do Sul state fire department said.
A witness told local media that he managed to get out of his room around 2 a.m. after the fire broke out, wading through the smoke as the flames got closer.
“I just had time to put on my flip flops and run. “My sister, who lived on the third floor, ended up burned alive,” Marcelo Wagner Schelech, 56, told the newspaper Zero Hora.
Known as Garoa Floresta, the hotel is part of the Garoa group, a chain that has 22 other small hotels in Porto Alegre. In 2022, a fire broke out at another of the hotels, killing one person and injuring 11.
Porto Alegre Mayor Sebastião Melo said in a press conference that his administration had signed an agreement with the company in 2020 for the use of 400 of its rooms to house homeless people.
Melo said that the contract will now be investigated and the chain’s 22 units, all of them social housing providers, will be inspected.
The Porto Alegre city council had contracts for 16 rooms in the small hotel that caught fire on Friday.
Eight of the 11 people rescued from the fire remain hospitalized, two of them still in serious but non-life-threatening condition, local authorities said. Two of the people who sought medical attention were homeless. All victims will now receive shelter elsewhere.