What led to hotel fire disaster at Turkish ski resort?

The fire that killed at least 76 people at the Grand Kartal Hotel in the early hours of Monday is one of the deadliest disasters of its kind in Turkish history.

Some survivors have said they did not hear an alarm and experts have told the BBC they would not have expected such a high death toll in a hotel where fire protection systems were working properly.

The 12-storey hotel at Turkey’s popular Kartalkaya ski resort hosts tens of thousands of visitors every year, so Turks understandably want to know how such a terrible tragedy could have happened at the start of a two-week school holiday.

The interior minister said the fire started at 03:27 (00:27 GMT) in the restaurant area on the fourth floor and firefighters arrived within 45 minutes.

Some survivors have described smelling smoke as much as an hour earlier.

Culture and Tourism minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said the hotel had a fire competence certificate “issued by the fire department”.

But that has been challenged by local mayor Tanju Ozcan, who said the fire department had not issued a positive report since 2007.

Some survivors say they heard no alarm, while there have been claims of inadequacies in the hotel’s fire extinguishing systems.

“My wife smelled the fire,” said Atakan Yelkovan, who said he was staying on the third floor of the hotel.

“We went down earlier than others. The alarm did not go off… It took about an hour to an hour-ad-a-half for the fire brigade to come. In the meantime, the fourth and fifth floors were burning. People on the upper floors were screaming.”

Some guests on higher floors tried to escape with their bedding and some jumped to their deaths.

Eylem Senturk said the fire alarm did not go off until she was out of the building. Her husband had to jump off the hotel porch because of the smoke: “We are very lucky to have survived.”

The BBC has tried to contact the hotel’s managers regarding these allegations but has so far received no response.

Nine people, including the hotel owner, have been detained as part of the Turkish investigation.

Hotel managers have issued a statement saying they mourn the losses and are co-operating fully with the authorities.

In such a big building where fire systems are fully operational, experts say fire detectors are expected to respond to a fire within seconds and send an alert to a fire control dashboard.

“In a good business, there should be someone in charge of this panel 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Kazim Beceren, president of the Turkish Fire Protection and Education Foundation, told the BBC.

The death toll is also extremely high, which raises further questions.

“There will always be fires, but we would not expect so many people to die in this type of building,” said Prof Sevket Ozgur Atayilmaz, head of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Yildiz Technical University, who has worked on fire safety planning.

“If the structure is designed correctly for fire, if there are escape routes, and if the smoke is evacuated correctly, it is possible to overcome the fire without loss of life.”

The interior minister said there were two fire escapes, but there are indications they were not of a good standard.

An official from the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects (TMMOB) in Bolu, Erol Percin, said the way the fire had spread suggested that fire warning, detection and extinguishing systems might not have been present.

He said the building’s exterior wooden facade should have been 100% fire-resistant, but that did not appear to be the case.

The head of the Turkish Fire Protection and Education Foundation told the BBC that the size of the fire suggested that “the fire system either does not exist or was not designed in accordance with the standards”.

There were 238 people staying in the Grand Kartal Hotel at the time.

Kazim Beceren said fire safety systems were designed with the aim of taking three minutes to evacuate each floor – and a facility with more than 200 people could be evacuated in 15 to 30 minutes under ideal conditions.

When an alarm goes off, the person in charge of the fire control dashboard is expected to check the location, according to the head of the Turkish Fire Protection and Education Foundation.

If there is no indication of a false alarm or if a second detector sends a warning, fire alarms are then normally activated throughout the building.

In a properly installed system, people are then directed by announcement to the nearest fire exits, with flashing lights for people who are hearing-impaired or audible warnings for those sleeping.

As fires can spread very quickly, sprinkler systems are seen as highly important for intervention at an early stage.

So too is a back-up power source. According to fire protection regulations, signs pointing to emergency exits and lights showing the paths to these exits have to work for one to three hours, even if there is a power outage.

The engineers’ and architects’ union in Bolu said in a statement that “an automatic sprinkler system is mandatory” in buildings of this size.

“The photos on the hotel’s website show that the automatic sprinkler system, which was supposed to be installed in 2008, was not installed. Because of this failure, the fire spread rapidly and there were casualties.”

BBC Turkish has not been able to independently confirm the allegations about either the wooden cladding on the building or the hotel’s fire extinguishing system.

One of the big questions is whether the hotel’s fire systems were properly inspected.

Bolu Mayor Tanju Ozcan said the ministry of tourism was responsible as the hotel was beyond the boundary of his town. Erol Percin agreed.

The mayor said that the last time Bolu’s municipality had given a report stating the hotel was fireproof was in 2007, and there had been no such checks since then.

However, Culture and Tourism Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said the hotel did have a fire competence certificate “issued by the fire department” and inspections were down to them.

There have also been calls for relatively old structures to come under scrutiny because of changing legislation.

“Places should stop operating if they do not comply with current standards, in crowded places such as hotels, residences, nursing homes or kindergartens,” says Prof Atayilmaz of Yildiz Technical University.