THE ESCAPE Survivors last night told of the panic among hotel guests who tried to flee the suffocating smoke only to find exit doors locked. Some leaped from windows, others knotted sheets together and tried to scale down the side of the building. Two guests trapped on the eighth floor - the top - of the Duan Xi hotel used a chair to break a window and draped sheets down, only to find they did not reach the ground. Businessman Mr Lin said: 'It only reached the fourth floor. So we gave up. 'We saw one boarder jump out from the seventh floor. He lay on the ground motionless, probably dead,' said Mr Wang. Mr Lin, who cut his hand smashing the window, said staff did not alert guests as the smoke billowed through the hotel. A sales assistant at a furniture shop opposite the hotel, who stayed at the shop overnight, said he had seen several people jump out of windows on the upper floors because they could not escape. 'I was woken up by the noise at around 2.30 am to find the block was almost buried in dark smoke. 'Screams and cries filled the air and some people broke their room windows in a bid to escape,' he said. 'Some used the blankets and sheets to make a long rope to climb down.' One guest said it was like 'being in hell. There were so many people shouting for help.' 'I opened the door and thick smoke poured into my room. I am lucky I survived.' Mr Lin told how they realised something was wrong at about 2:30 am when the electricity suddenly blacked out and they could smell burning. 'But we later learned that the fire had started at 2 am. If someone had come to alert us, so many people would not have been trapped.' Mr Lin and his business partner Mr Wang, from Zhejiang, said that even when the fire brigade arrived almost an hour after the fire started the pair could not immediately escape from the smoke. 'The scaling ladder the firemen had only reached the sixth floor,' said Mr Wang. They were rescued when the firemen broke the locked exit door and went upstairs to bring them down. A hotel maid, Ms Lu, from Hunan province, who only learned of the disaster when she returned to work in the morning, said: 'There has not been any fire drill since I joined the hotel two years ago. 'It was a very rare accident and I hope the hotel could be re-opened again soon or the 100 staff might have to face being jobless.'
