Asahi: 4 injured, 150 evacuated, after Tokyo hotel fire
Four people were injured and about 150 guests, including 20 foreign marathoners, were evacuated after a fire broke out at the Shiba Park Hotel in central Tokyo early Friday, police and firefighters said. The fire started around 1:35 a.m. on the fifth floor of the nine-story main building of the hotel in Minato Ward, destroying parts of the facility and burning about 25 square meters of floor space. The main building was not equipped with a sprinkler system. According to the Metropolitan Police Department and the Tokyo Fire Department, 455 guests were staying at the main building and the 12-story annex when the fire broke out. All 150 lodgers in the main building, occupying about 40 percent of the 162 rooms, were evacuated, including about 20 from overseas who are here to take part in Sunday's Tokyo Marathon...Police and the fire department have not identified the cause of the fire, which was extinguished in about two hours... The hotel buildings are equipped with smoke detectors and other fire-prevention devices but the main building does not have a sprinkler system because it opened in 1949, long before the fire defense law obliged hotels, theaters and other facilities to install the sprinklers in 1961. Although hotels, department stores and hospitals are required to have the sprinklers even if they were built before 1961, many hotels have put priority on upgrading other fire-prevention equipment, such as smoke detectors. Under the law, fire department chiefs can order facilities to install sprinklers and other fire-prevention devices. The Tokyo Fire Department said it was confirming if it had issued such an order to the Shiba Park Hotel...more...
It takes 47 years to install a sprinker system? That hotel has been fairly popular with foreigners through the years:
TIJ..
