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POLISH OFFICIALS HAVE shut down 13 escape room entertainment sites for safety flaws and the prime minister asked people today to report such lapses to firefighters and police after five teenage girls were killed in a fire.
Players in escape room games are locked inside a room or building and must solve puzzles and find clues that lead them to the key that will unlock the door.
Regarded as an intellectual challenge, the games are highly popular among teenagers in Poland.
Fire chief Leszek Suski said the escape room at a private house in the city of Koszalin, where the 15-year-old girls died Friday locked inside a room celebrating a birthday, had no emergency evacuation route.
They were the first known deaths in an escape room, a form of entertainment that has been growing in Poland over the past five years.
Firefighters found the victims’ bodies after they extinguished a fire next to the locked room.
Autopsies showed that the girls, who were friends from school, died of carbon monoxide inhalation. A young man employed there was hospitalised with burns.
Prosecutors say a leaky gas container inside a heater is the most likely cause of the blaze.
Police chief Jaroslaw Szymczyk said other people had previously posted critical remarks online about the safety of that escape room site, but local officials weren’t notified.
The 28-year-old who designed and runs the site has been detained and will be questioned, Szymczyk said. His injured employee is also going to be questioned.
During a memorial Catholic Mass at Koszalin Cathedral, Bishop Edward Dajczak identified the girls by their first names as Julia, Amelia, Gosia, Karolina and Wiktoria.
Public prayers were planned later today in front of the house where they died.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, along with Suski and Szymczyk, spoke after holding a meeting in which they discussed with other officials ways of improving safety at entertainment venues.
Morawiecki called the girls’ deaths an “immense tragedy.”
Since Friday, more than 200 of Poland’s 1,100 escape rooms have been checked, revealing a number of safety flaws that needed to be immediately fixed. Authorities ordered the closure of 13 of them.
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You would think in the event of an emergency the rooms would automatically unlock poor kids god rest them
@Mark Dawson: not if the only thing on your mind is profit as it is with most of the places in Poland
@Remington: its the same here fire safety is a joke. No one checks behind builders or during building very little enforcement of fire safety regs. There is apartment blocks around the country that would go up like a match they are that badly designed and most commerical premises do not want to cost of being upto date
@Remington: That is very brave statement of yours. I believe you have some backup to this.
@Eric Polter: Indeed, just out of 178 of escape rooms controlled 129 did not meet health and safety requirements and there are 1100 escape rooms registered in Poland.
@Remington: That’s pathetic. As mentioned above, how are we doing with our schools and a lot of apartment complexes. With more to come. Think before you post.
@Paul Furey: think before you post? Those are facts that I neither made up nor you can deny.
Tragic. RIP
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