Thirty-nine infants were in the special newborn care unit when the fire broke out before dawn. Doctors and nurses evacuated the ward as staff disconnected life-support equipment.
Three Newborns Die in Fire at Amravati Hospital's Neonatal Unit
Aalimi Nation · Amravati
Three newborn babies died after a fire broke out in the neonatal care unit of the District Women's Hospital in Amravati, Maharashtra, early on Monday, according to [SOURCE — official name and designation to be confirmed].
The fire began at around 3.30am on the hospital's third floor, where 39 newborns were being treated in the Special Newborn Care Unit. Initial reports indicate the blaze followed an explosion involving a ventilator, though the cause has not been officially established.
Six infants who were critically affected were transferred to a nearby super-speciality hospital. Three newborns died after suffering burns and smoke inhalation.
The evacuation
The emergency unfolded in a ward where many of the patients could not breathe unaided or be moved without support.
Doctors, nurses and hospital staff began evacuating the infants as soon as the fire was detected, carrying babies away from the affected area while disconnecting equipment and maintaining emergency care. In a neonatal unit, each infant may be attached to a ventilator, a monitor, an oxygen line and an intravenous drip; moving one child safely can require more than one member of staff.
That thirty-six of the thirty-nine were brought out is a measure of what the night shift managed in the dark, in smoke, with no time.
The ventilator
The reported involvement of a ventilator places medical equipment and electrical safety at the centre of the investigation.
Investigators will need to determine whether the device malfunctioned, whether an electrical fault preceded it, and whether the unit's fire detection and suppression systems worked as designed. No official finding has yet established what caused the explosion. Accounts identifying the ventilator as the source should be treated as preliminary.
The question is not a new one in Indian hospitals. In November 2021, an inquiry into a fire at the Kamla Nehru Children's Hospital in Bhopal, in which four infants died, concluded that the blaze started when staff plugged in a ventilator and it sparked. That unit was also on a third floor, and also held about forty children.
A recurring failure
The Amravati fire joins a list that has grown steadily.
Ten newborns died at the district hospital in Bhandara, in the same state, in January 2021, after a fire in the sick newborn care unit at around 2am; seven were rescued. Ten more died at the Maharani Lakshmibai Medical College in Jhansi in November 2024, in a unit holding 49 infants, in a fire police attributed most likely to a faulty oxygen concentrator. Parents and witnesses there said the ward's fire alarms did not sound.
The pattern across these incidents is consistent: an electrical fault in life-support or heating equipment, in a ward on an upper floor, at night, holding more infants than it was built for.
The question that follows
Hospitals run complex electrical loads continuously, and neonatal units run the most sensitive of them. Warmers, ventilators, concentrators and monitors operate around the clock in a confined space rich in oxygen. Even a short interruption to any of them can be fatal to a patient weighing less than two kilograms.
What distinguishes a neonatal unit from any other ward, though, is that nobody in it can leave on their own. Every evacuation depends entirely on the number of adults present and the seconds available to them.
That is the standard against which fire safety in these units should be designed and audited: not whether a building can be emptied, but whether this ward, on this floor, at three in the morning, with the staff actually rostered, can be emptied in time.
For the families in Amravati, that question stopped being theoretical on Monday morning.
Investigation into the fire is continuing.
