Northern Yangon fire levels market, injures five

Burnt down Nyaung village – via YESC Call-Center Facebook page
Burnt down Nyaung village – via YESC Call-Center Facebook page

A giant fire — one of three over the weekend — ripped through a village market in Northern Yangon on Saturday, leveling most of the structures and injuring five people, according to the Myanmar Fire Services.

Among the injured were three firefighters and two local residents. Pictures and video of the Nyaung village blaze’s aftermath quickly went viral on social media, showing a barren, leveled landscape of smoldering and hollowed-out structures where the market used to stand.

According to Eleven Media, the fire started after sparks from a welding torch at a nearby construction site came into contact with an open gas barrel in an illegal roadside gas station. The fire quickly spread across the entire market, burning down shops and homes, and damaging key electricity infrastructure supplying energy to Southern Yangon townships.

“There was a house being constructed next to many of these roadside gas stations. When they were welding, some sparks flew and dropped into the gas barrels and the fire started. They are many gas stations like that in a row,” a Nyaung village resident told the local-language outlet.

Yangon Chief Minister Phyo Min Thein arrived at the scene just 45 minutes later along with other city officials to observe the firefighting operation, something that served to underscore the severity of the fire.

https://www.facebook.com/ChiefMinisterOffice.YangonRegionGovernment/posts/2515968428477398

The Nyaung village fire was just one of three sizeable fires that occured in Yangon over the weekend. In the early hours of Sunday morning, a fire broke out at King Foam Industrial, a Taiwanese company that manufactures shoe materials in Hlaingtharyar township. Later that same morning, a home in North Okkalapa township was engulfed in flames before being quickly extinguished by dozens of firefighters. 

Yangon is notoriously unsafe in terms of fire safety, with news of one or more fires breaking every day, endangering the property, livelihoods and health of its 5 million residents. In extreme cases, the Yangon Fire Services can become stretched thin, with multiple fires to put out all over the city.

Just last year there was a single day in which at least seven fires broke out across the former capital.

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