Flames seen in the top storey of the Loafers Lodge building in Adelaide Road, Newtown, Wellington. Photo: Supplied / Axel Dann
On Wednesday police and fire fighters are entering the ravaged Loafers Lodge hostel in Wellington today to start recovering at least six bodies and confirm the number of people who have died. On Wednesday morning 11 remained unaccounted for.
About 100 people were in the hostel when the fire broke out, just after midnight on Tuesday morning.
The survivors of the Loafers Lodge fire have described the chaotic experience of trying to escape through smoke-filled hallways.
"The people next door to me were dying," Hemi Jones told First Up. He'd been living at the lodge for four months before the fire.
"[I] opened my door and there was just smoke everywhere, and there was flames coming from the roof. I couldn't breathe.
"So I hit the floor and I crawled, three flights down to the bottom."
About 60 residents from Loafers Lodge took shelter at an evacuation centre on Tuesday, with staff from Wellington City Council and the Salvation Army helping to find accommodation for the evacuees, who'd had to flee without any posessions.
Hemi Jones told First Up he'd lost everything.
"It's all gone. I'm still in the same clothes."
Mr Jones was discharged from hospital late on Tuesday morning, but still coughing after inhaling so much smoke in the evacuation.
Fellow resident Mark Jones had initially thought nothing of the fire alarms going off.
"The lodge has been known for having false alarms all the time. They'd go on and people get woken up, and then five minutes later would go off again, and it's mostly people smoking in bed."
He said it was not until the lodge's handyman Glen came screaming for people to get out that Mark and his wife fled their first floor room.
"Came screaming down and said: 'Get the hell out of here quickly because the building's on fire.' So that was enough for me because I know Glen wouldn't do that as a prank or anything like that. So by the time we actually got out the door there was a thick cloud of smoke coming down the corridor. And it had a really, really bad smell to it, like some sort of chemical solvent."
With the speed at which the fire spread through the third floor, Mark speculated it could have been arson.
"We think there was some sort of accelerant. So we're pretty sure that someone did it deliberately."
Doug Brown was at the evacuation centre to find a friend who lived at the lodge, but the friend could not be found. He had been urging his mate to move out of the lodge for a long time, he said.
"It's one of the worst places to be put in there," Mr Brown said. "I wouldn't recommend anyone stay. There's just not the kind of place you'd want your kids or grandma or you want to be living in."
He said the rooms were tiny and cramped.
"I think some of those rooms were just cupboards. You go in, there's no window.
"Some of the rooms would have [their] own bathroom... There's only a few of them on each level. Otherwise you all had to use the same bathroom."
Another resident, Graham, does not know where he will go next. "I'm gutted. I've got nowhere to live."
