RICHMOND, British Columbia (AP) -- Two women from Maryland who apparently were on their way back from a trip to China have died of injuries from a hotel fire in this suburb south of Vancouver.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced the second death Monday, describing the victim only as a woman in her 60s. A woman initially described as 49 years old died shortly after the fire late Thursday night at the Best Western Richmond Inn.
Police did not identify either woman, but Bradley Klein of New York told The Sun of Baltimore the younger was his sister, Margy P. Klein, 46, of Ellicott City, Md. She had been traveling with a co-worker at a travel agency Travel Destinations Management Group in Owings Mills, Md., identified by a close friend as Jean Gibbs, 63, of Owings Mills.
The friend said the last report on Gibbs was that she was hospitalized with severe injuries.
The two were returning from China and had not planned to stay the night, but they either missed a connection or their plane was delayed, Klein said.
Fourteen people were taken to hospitals and 30 were treated at the scene after flames roared through a hallway on the second floor of a 30-year-old wing of the hotel near Vancouver International Airport, authorities said. About 350 people escaped from the two-story building without significant injury.
Radio CKNW of Vancouver quoted investigators Monday as saying the fire started when heat from floodlights ignited cardboard and other packing materials in a storage area. Fire officials said hotel guests helped save lives by scrambling to get others out of the building and off balconies.
''There was a lot of scrambling and terror, indeed panic, going on and everyone pitching in to make sure that people's lives were saved,'' Richmond Fire Chief Jim Hancock said the day after the blaze.
Neither of the two women made it out of the building, officials said.
Klein said that a funeral for his sister was being arranged for this week in Cincinnati, where she grew up.
Copyright 2005 Associated Press
