The fire that broke out Monday at a lithium battery production plant in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province has left 16 people dead and seven others injured as of 5 p.m. 

According to fire authorities, 15 bodies were additionally recovered after a man in his sixties died from cardiac arrest earlier in the day. Two people were seriously injured while five others sustained minor injuries.

Just some 20 minutes after the fire broke out at around 10:30 a.m., authorities proactively issued a Level Two alert requiring up to seven fire stations to mobilize a maximum 50 units of firefighting equipment. 

Authorities said the main fire was extinguished at around 3:10 p.m., adding that efforts are still under way to put out residual flames and find the remaining missing people. 

With the latest discovery of the bodies, the number of people missing from the fire slipped to six. 

The fire is said to have started on the second floor of one of the eleven concrete steel buildings in the plant that sits on a plot of land measuring some 55-hundred square meters. 

Authorities said firefighters faced difficulty in the early stages of extinguishing the fire as lithium was stored in the building that caught fire. 

The labor ministry has set up an industrial accident response headquarters and is assisting efforts to put out the fire.