A former employee said she never saw the staff perform fire drills. The local fire chief pushed back at claims that dispatching more firefighters would’ve saved more lives.

Top Massachusetts officials are suggesting the state consider new ways to regulate and finance so-called affordable assisted living homes after the deadly fire Sunday night at the facility for seniors in Fall River that relies heavily on public funding.

Nine people were killed and one was critically injured in an assisted living home fire in Fall River, Massachusetts, authorities said. Fall River Fire Chief Jeffrey Bacon called the fire at Gabriel House "an unfathomable tragedy.

A fire at Gabriel House assisted living in Fall River, Massachusetts, resulted in multiple deaths and injuries. City is responding and investigating.

You could have had 100 firefighters show up on that scene and it wouldn’t have been enough,” Jeffrey Bacon said at a news briefing outside the fire department’s headquarters Tuesday.

Residents of the Gabriel House in Fall River, Massachusetts described the terrifying moments that smoke filled the assisted living home​ and they had to find a way to escape.

The names of seven of the nine people who died in the Fall River fire on July 13 have been released to the public.

A Massachusetts assisted-living center where nine residents died in a fire was cited for failing to immediately report more than two dozen health and safety incidents.