SINGAPORE – A 68-year-old man was taken to hospital after a fire broke out at a flat in Chinatown on May 11. The police and Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) said they were alerted to the fire at Block 5 Banda Street at around 2.20pm. The fire broke out inside the bedroom of an 11th-floor flat, SCDF added. Firefighters extinguished the blaze, which involved a mattress, with a water jet. SCDF said it rescued a person from the unit and had to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the person. The person was unconscious when taken to Singapore General Hospital. The police and SCDF evacuated about 15 people from the affected block as a precaution. The cause of the fire is under investigation, SCDF added. According to statistics released by SCDF in February 2024, there were more fires in 2023 than the year before, with 1,954 cases in total. This represented an increase of 8.6 per cent from the 1,799 cases in 2022. Of the 1,954 fires in 2023, 970 – or almost half – were in residential buildings. Read more