Farmhouse fire kills seven children in Pennsylvania

  Fire fighters worked into the night to contain and investigate the deadly blaze

Seven children, aged from seven months to 11 years old, have died in a fire at a farmhouse in the borough of Blain in the US state of Pennsylvania.

The children's mother was milking cows in a barn and their father was napping in a delivery vehicle when the fire took hold, a state trooper said.
A girl, three, who survived the fire, alerted her mother to Tuesday night's blaze, Trooper Tom Pinkerton said.
Fire officials are investigating the cause of the blaze.
The children - six girls and one boy - died of smoke inhalation, police said the Perry County coroner had ruled.
"While mom's milking cows, her three-year-old daughter comes running into the barn and the three-year-old tells the mother that there's smoke inside the house," Trooper Pinkerton said. "Mom leaves the barn, comes running out, sees that the house appears to be on fire."
The mother ran to a neighbour to alert emergency services and ran with the child to the father's truck, the Associated Press reported the trooper as saying.
"Once the father was alerted he immediately rushed back to the house. At that time the fire department was already on scene, the residence was fully engulfed and once the fire was contained and put out our investigation has revealed right now that there is a total of seven deceased children inside of the residence," Trooper Pinkerton told local television.
The house is one of a cluster of homes near a road junction in Blain, a stretch of farm land about 20 miles (32km) north of Harrisburg.