(Bloomberg) -- People in China are lashing out at their officials over a fire that killed 39, some of them students — an incident that prompted President Xi Jinping to call for better efforts to ensure public safety after a string of deadly accidents to start the year. 

The blaze began Wednesday afternoon in a building in Xinyu, a city of 1.2 million people more than 700km (435 miles) southwest of Shanghai, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. The fire started in a basement where cold storage units were being renovated and workers “used fire illegally,” Xinhua said, without elaborating.

The fire then spread and thick smoke poured into the second floor, which had a hotel and an educational center for students preparing to attend university. Xinhua didn’t say how many of the dead were students. The incident left another nine people injured, and 12 have been taken into custody as police investigate.   

The accident was a trending topic on Chinese social media on Thursday. Some people went beyond offering the usual condolences, criticizing local officials for failing to ensure the building was safe. Popular posts on social media said officials were too busy carrying out various campaigns ordered by their superiors and producing “wordy reports.”   

“They really have no time to implement safety work, and could only take pictures, fill out forms and issue a statement,” one person wrote on Weibo. “Having accidents happen is inevitable.”

Another person suggested local officials “do less of this formalism.” “What’s the use of the Xinyu mayor bowing and apologizing?” they wrote. “Many problems could have been avoided in the first place.”

City officials said they have halted classes at the type of school that was in the building where the fire started. Social media users questioned that move, with one person saying that “suspending all renovations for rectification should be the correct way to deal with the situation.”  

See: Xi Faces Dilemma as China Quietly Detains Young Covid Protesters

Xinhua reported that Xi urged local officials to “curb the repeated occurrence of various kinds of safety accidents.” He also called on officials to protect “social stability,” in an apparent acknowledgment that the incident had the potential to spur unrest.

Discontent with the government’s harsh methods to curb the spread of Covid in late 2022 led to the most widespread protests in China in decades. Those demonstrations came to a head after a deadly fire in Urumqi. Back then social media users questioned whether firefighters had trouble putting out the blaze due to Covid Zero measures.

Xi’s comments come after a slew of deadly accidents in China this year. Earlier this week, a landslide in the southwestern province of Yunnan killed at least 34 people, and on Friday 13 students died in a fire in a school dormitory in the central province of Henan.

Social media users lamented on Thursday that the government has said little about what caused the dorm blaze.

“A few days have passed, but there hasn’t been any update on the fire in Henan,” one person wrote. “There’s nothing, not even a video interview, only the cold readout from the government. It’s really terrible.”

(Updates with suspension of training schools and more context.)

©2024 Bloomberg L.P.