4 killed after fire at PX Mart facility in Taichung

Taichung, Dec. 19 (CNA) Four people have died and several others are still missing following a fire at an under-construction PX Mart processing center in Taichung's Dadu District Thursday.

The Taichung City Fire Bureau said heavy machinery had been deployed to search for those unaccounted for and to put out residual fires inside the facility as of 5:35 p.m.

Of the dead, one was a 45-year-old male foreign national, according to Kuang Tien General Hospital in Shalu District.

Update: PX Mart Taichung facility fire toll rises to 9 after 5 bodies found

Roughly 30 people were on site when the fire broke out around 1:24 p.m., 19 of whom escaped without incident, the fire bureau said.

The fire bureau added that seven others who survived the fire were hospitalized.

Sun Fu-you (孫福佑), director-general of the Taichung City Fire Bureau, said the fire started in the basement and spread rapidly because of Styrofoam boards across the site.

The new processing center is being built by PX Mart subsidiary Sunmake Enterprise Co. and is located near the supermarket chain's existing processing center, according to the fire bureau.

The Environmental Protection Bureau in neighboring Changhua County has advised people in townships bordering and south of Dadu District to close windows while indoors and wear a face mask when going out because of heavy smoke caused by the fire.

PX Mart, the largest supermarket chain in Taiwan, currently has over 1,200 branches around Taiwan, according to the figure mentioned in a sales campaign in early December.

Its processing center in Dadu was already the largest facility preparing fresh meat and fish supplied to the chain's branches in central and southern Taiwan, PXMart President Tony Tsai (蔡篤昌) told a local business news website in May.