Ten people, including three children, died Friday in a house fire in Pennsylvania, in the eastern United States, police said in a statement.
Rescuers intervened very early Friday morning in a house in Nescopeck, a small town in the east of the state, and “10 victims” including “three minors” were “found dead in the building”, indicated the police of Pennsylvania in a statement sent to AFP.
Three adults were able to get out of the blaze safe and sound, added the police, who did not provide an explanation of the causes of the fire which completely destroyed the house.
Images from American media show the ruins of a building completely gutted by flames, the walls charred.
The three children, two boys and a girl, were aged five, six and seven. The ages of the other seven victims range from 19 to 79 years old.
Harold Baker, a Nescopeck firefighter called overnight to the scene of the blaze, lost two of his children and knew eight of the ten victims altogether, he told The New York Times.
At the start of the year, two terrible fires had marked the northeastern United States: 17 people, including eight children, had perished on January 9 in a building in the working-class district of the Bronx, in New York.
And, five days earlier, eight children and four adults had succumbed to a fire in a public housing district in the center of Philadelphia, the main city of Pennsylvania.