[By Jiao Haiyang/China.org.cn ]

Now that the flames that ravaged a 28-story apartment building in Shanghai, leaving 53 dead and 90 injured, have been extinguished, the nation has begun asking what could have been done to prevent such a tremendous loss of life.

Though it is convenient to place all the blame squarely on the shoulders of a few unqualified welders and some highly flammable bamboo scaffolding, to do so would be to neglect the more serious and far-reaching fire safety issues that this tragedy brings to light.

High-casualty fires such as this may not be frequent in China at the moment, but as the urbanization speeds up, more Chinese will be living in high-rise apartments, which makes fire safety all the more vital. And China still has a long way to go in terms of fire prevention.

The damage that was done in the fire could have been mitigated and fewer lives would have been lost had there been greater fire-control systems in place and other preventative measures.

When I first arrived in China, I was shocked to see that smoke detectors, which are ubiquitous in US households, are practically nonexistent in even some of the newer, high-priced apartments. These simple and cheap plastic devices are the first line of defense against fires.

Without smoke detectors, a fire can break out while one is sleeping and by the time he or she wakes up, it is too late. In the US, we are taught practically since birth to religiously check the batteries in our smoke detectors. And in a high-rise building that is densely populated, one person being alerted to a fire can set off alarms that save the lives of many others.