As he was the only welder at the time, he was told to find some assistants to help him with the welding; for that, he enlisted the help of two fresh produce workers of the department store.
After some initial troubles with powering on the blowtorch, Wang successfully turned it on with the help of Zhou Jian, an electrician also working that night.
The fire brigades were only called around 30 minutes after the smouldering was noticed, after the Managing vice-director of Dennis arrived at 9:20pm on a routine visit in preparations for opening.
Once the workers were evacuated to the plaza in front of the building, a roll call was attempted, but due to the chaos, it was not completed.
As the staff and construction workers of Dennis and the management of Dongdu made an escape, the hundreds of people partying and the office workers on level four were forgotten about, with no-one to warn them or to unlock the locked gates or doors, trapping them in darkness and dense smoke.
[4][7] Alternatively, according to Henan investigators, the fire burnt out the insulators of wiring at 9:38pm, causing the blackout,[9] though the people above the Dennis store levels were indeed forgotten.
After flashover, the smoke was estimated to have taken only 6 seconds to reach level 4, and 3.3 minutes to subsequently envelop the whole nightclub.
With only one door to enter the nightclub and only one unlocked stairwell, any opportunity to escape was rapidly lost.
[1] An emergency meeting was held early Tuesday morning in the province and in the afternoon, Shi Wanpeng, vice-minister of the State Economic and Trade Commission, also arrived in Luoyang.
To prevent similar accidents, the Ministry of Public Security released an urgent circular, asking local governments to spare no efforts to ensure safety during the New Year's Day and the Spring Festival holidays.
[6] The building was repaired and reopened for business after the fire, however, very few tenants returned; nearby streets had also been impacted, with the area no longer being bustling.
Fire sprinklers were still only partially installed, as funding ran out before the system was fitted to the entire building.