PATTAYA – October 22, 2013 [PDN]:
A journalist reported that at 2.45 p.m. a fire was burning at a 3-4 storey rented commercial building including over 10-stalls. These included Arabian restaurants, a construction materials shop and a money exchange booth of the Kasikorn Thai bank. All were located between at Nos. 18-19 in Soi-2 at South Pattaya, on the east side of the road leading to Pratamnak Hill and nearby Marine Plaza Hotel. This area is a popular place for Middle Eastern tourists staying in the South Pattaya area in Thailand’s Chonburi Province.
A team from the Pattaya City Police Station quickly rushed to inspect the scene and blockaded the area to prevent people from coming too close to the fire and blocking the road. The officers also assisted in moving the valuable assets out of buildings that were located nearby the scene. They liaised with the firemen from the Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation in Pattaya City, in bringing 7-fire trucks along to spray water to control the fire. Due to the dense area of the incident, the fire is burning in connected commercial buildings, including over 10-business premises, which consist of a construction materials shop, hardware shop, electric appliances shop, home-decorated shop and a clothing shop. All of these are the very good fuel for the fire and behind the buildings there are also many kinds of other shops located, which is making fire fighting very difficult. The fire spread out to the nearby buildings so quickly that the firemen had to coordinate with other related organizations, such as Nong Prue Municipality and the Banglamung Municipality, who all had to bring more fire trucks to assist.
At this time the fire fighting officers are still attempting to extinguish this blazing fire which the officers have already been fighting for more than 20-minutes, they still cannot control the fire. There are many frightened foreign tourists that are staying near the fire scene and also the smoke that is drifting up into the air that could be seen from Pattaya Beach. The tourists that were swimming in the sea and sunbathe on the beach were so surprised that they hurried to take photographs of the fire and post them on internet immediately.
Local people and tourists informed officials that the origin of fire might have come from the kitchen of the “Abusais Restaurant,” which is the Arabian restaurant where they heard the noise of an explosion, as if their gas exploded and then there was a fire that ignited and spread out to the nearby building very severely, so the blaze could not be extinguished immediately. The police assumed that the blaze has started from the liquid gas cylinders in the Arabian restaurant, which appear to have exploded before the fire spread out.
The buildings that are burnt and got damaged so far, such as Rattanakorn Limited Partnership and Charoenphong Hardware Shop, (which is a construction materials shop), had thinners that exploded continuously, so the building of the money-exchange booth of Kasikorn Thai bank also got extensively damaged.
Initially, the officers are now still attempting to extinguish the fire and still are not completely sure of the place or origin of the fire, plus the cause of the continuous burning at this time. They also cannot estimate exactly all of the damage, because they have to extinguish the fire first, then investigate in detail again, but the initial estimate is that the damage is around 10-million THB (Thai baht).
