The fire that killed at least six people in Brussels this week started small and in a place no one expected it to trap anyone: the second floor of a building undergoing renovation in one of the city's main shopping areas. By the time firefighters gained control of it, the blaze had spread into a lift shaft — and that's where the worst of it happened.
The site was the Oxy building, a large mixed-use complex on Place de Brouckère undergoing major renovation, with more than 200 workers on site when the fire broke out on the morning of Tuesday, July 14. Some reports put the number as high as 250. Firefighters were able to evacuate the majority of workers and brought the initial blaze under control relatively quickly — but the fire had already spread into one of the building's elevator shafts, igniting a second fire and cutting off access to whoever was still inside.
Trapped in an elevator
Rescue crews initially reported six workers unaccounted for. By Tuesday evening, the Belgian Labor Audit Office confirmed the grim outcome: bodies had been found inside one of the building's two elevators. Brecht Speybrouck, a spokesperson for the office, described the scene to Reuters in stark terms: "We had small access to one of the two elevator cabinets and there we had a view that there are some corpses of two or three people who died." Belgian broadcaster RTBF later confirmed all six bodies had been located in the shaft. Two additional workers were taken to hospital with severe burns.
Why rescuers couldn't reach them in time
First responders described struggling specifically to reach the blocked elevators — at least two of the shafts were obstructed, complicating both the firefighting effort and the search for survivors. That detail is central to why a fire that started in a contained area on one floor ended up trapping and killing people elsewhere in the building: once flames reached the shaft, they effectively created a chimney that carried fire and smoke through the structure faster than crews could clear a path in.
A criminal investigation, and unanswered questions
Belgian authorities have opened a criminal investigation into the fire, standard procedure in Belgium for a workplace death of this scale, and the exact cause has not been made public. Investigators will need to determine why the fire started on the second floor, how it reached the elevator shafts so quickly, and whether the site's fire-safety and evacuation procedures were adequate for a renovation project with over 200 workers present. As of this week, no findings had been released, and the Labor Audit Office had not said whether all six confirmed deaths matched the six workers originally reported missing.