Fire Ravages Manila Orphanage

A deadly pre-dawn fire devastated a Philippine orphanage on Thursday and killed at least 27 people, most of them children trapped on upper floors and babies abandoned in a nursery, officials said.

Police said at least three children were still missing by Thursday evening, some 15 hours after the fire ravaged the sprawling Associacion de Damas de Pilipinas orphanage in central Manila.

About 70 people were inside the Catholic-run Bahay Kalinga orphanage and children's home in the slum area in Manila's Paco district when the fire broke out about 2 a.m., officials said.

It broke out the day before a local company was to host a Christmas party for the institution, located just one mile from the presidential palace.

President Joseph Estrada visited the orphanage during the day as said he would personally lead a campaign to raise funds for its reconstruction.

Orphanage workers said some of those killed could not get out of the blazing three-storey wooden building because its exit doors were locked.

Several children trapped in a room were heard crying before flames swallowed the 78-year-old structure, radio reports said.

The executive director of the orphanage, Precy Ledaslia, said 27 people were killed in the blaze, one of the worst to hit the nation in recent years.

Funeral parlor employees said five of the orphanage fire victims were adults. All the rest were babies and children, including one about three months old.

Their bodies were charred, some unrecognizable, the officials said.

More than 50 people -- 24 children and their guardians and employees -- scrambled out of the building after the fire broke out, Mayor Lito Atienza told reporters.

Faulty wiring in the chapel or the adjoining library of the orphanage was suspected to be the cause.

Atienza said he was ordering an investigation into reports that the first fire truck did not arrive at the scene until about an hour after the blaze started -- although the orphanage is only 1,600 feet from the nearest fire station.

"We couldn't even go near because of the intense heat," said Maj. Pablito Cordeta, operations chief of the Manila Fire Department. "A few seconds after we arrived, part of the roof collapsed."

Firemen began dousing the blaze from the outside as columns of white smoke climbed into the moonlit sky.

As the firemen shone flashlights into the darkened shell of the orphanage, they could see bodies of some children lying on the iron frames of beds.

Other bodies had fallen to the ground floor as ceilings collapsed, piling roofing materials, iron bars and smoldering bits of wood on to the corpses.

The wooden floors and ceilings were the first to burn, and the cotton mattresses on the beds quickly became fire-traps from which there was no escape, firemen said. Most of the victims were trapped in the upper stories, said one investigator, Redentor Alumno

For some children, especially the babies abandoned in the nursery, death would have come quickly because of smoke inhalation during sleep. But others awoke and screamed for help from windows.

Only some of the older ones managed to clamber out and jump to the ground. Most of the survivors were sleeping on the ground floor.

"I heard babies crying at one end of the building but we could not reach them because the flames were spreading rapidly and we could not stand the heat," said orphanage worker Tobias Ronan.

"I was able to get eight children out from one of the rooms but three others were left behind. I don't know what happened to them," an orphanage teacher told reporters.

The tragedy occurred on the eve of Friday's Christmas party for the children of the orphanage.

"We were supposed to go there today with gifts for the children," party organizer Tony Castro of the phone giant Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co said.

©1998 CBS Worldwide Corp. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report