Relatives of patients at the Gozo hospital praised nurses for what they described as heroic courage in evacuating patients when a fire broke out on Christmas Day.

Dominic Carbonaro was just about to go to bed on Sunday evening when he checked his favourite news portals like he always does at the end of the day.

A news story describing how part of the Gozo hospital had just caught fire shocked him to the core.

Just that morning he had taken his mother-in-law to the hospital for treatment and she was spending the night there.

“I feared the worst-case scenario, of course, and rushed to the hospital,” he told Times of Malta on Monday.

“When I arrived, I could see that several other patients’ family members, like me, had gone to check on their relatives. But,  by then, the staff had already evacuated everyone out of harm’s way.”

Carbonaro said nurses were, quite literally, risking their lives to go back inside the hospital repeatedly to fetch more patients as the evacuation operation was underway.

“A few nurses at the hospital had oxygen masks on their faces because they had inhaled smoke,” he said.

“And, this morning, when I went back to visit my mother-in-law, I could see some of the nurses who were on shift yesterday were already back to work. These people deserve some national recognition for the superb job they did on Christmas Day.”

Hospital staff realised something was wrong at around 9pm on Sunday, when the fire alarm went off loudly, ringing incessantly through the wards, after most patients had already slept or were dozing off.

A small fire had broken out in a server room located in the male general ward and chaos ensued.

Nurses called the emergency services and started wheeling patients out into the parking lot while they waited for civil protection personnel and fire engines to arrive.

Some patients were evacuated in wheelchairs while others were wheeled out bed and all.

A total of 59 patients were evacuated and most of them were elderly. The Civil Protection Department deployed five fire tenders to the scene.

A few people there said they saw Gozo Minister Clint Camilleri helping out with the evacuation as well.

He arrived shortly after the news broke to help with the relocation of patients, most of whom were temporarily moved to other hospital wards and the Barts Medical School situated on hospital grounds.

During the evacuation, Active Ageing Minister Jo Etienne Abela also posted to Facebook saying he was in contact with the hospital administration and closely following the situation.

He thanked all workers and firemen for their work. 

Steward Health Care, which runs the Gozo hospital, confirmed in a statement the fire broken out in an ‘IT room’.

It was not a big fire and it was controlled and extinguished by civil protection workers before it could spread to other wards.

The bigger problem was that the fire started in a room which was relatively close to the front door of the male general ward, causing a lot of smoke to spread along the hospital corridors.

As a result, staff and CPD had to evacuate patients from most of the wards, even though  there was a fire in only one.

Nobody was injured but a couple of nurses were reportedly kept under observation for a few hours for smoke inhalation.

“The patients were the safest because, once they were out of the hospital, danger was completely averted for them,” one hospital worker explained.

“Not so for the nurses,  though, because they repeatedly had to go back inside and brave the smoke to evacuate more patients.”

A magisterial inquiry is underway and sources said investigators are so far excluding foul play. But it remains unclear what caused the fire, with senior sources suspecting it could have broken out when some cables or electronic equipment overheated.

Patients were transferred back to the hospital at around midnight.

Except for parts of the hospital where the stench still prevailed and soot covered the walls and the floor, everything was back to normal yesterday and hospital workers spent the day clearing debris and repainting parts of the hospital that were affected by the fire.