A huge fire raged out of control through a densely populated slum area in central Bangkok yesterday, with hundreds of firefighters battling the blaze near the Australian and German embassies and several luxury hotels, officials and witnesses said.
The fire engulfed up to 700 wooden houses in the Tungmahamek slum area, home to about 7,000 people behind Bangkok's Sathorn business district, and threatened to spread beyond the congested region as strong winds fanned the flames.
PHOTO: AFP
A large plume of black smoke was seen from several kilometers away rising hundreds of meters into the air.
"As of now, we have not been able to control the fire," Sathorn district director Prasan Bumrungpunt told Bangkok radio from the chaotic scene of the blaze nearly two hours after it began.
"All of the wooden houses in the slum have burned down," he said, adding that some 600 to 700 shanty-style houses had been in the area.
There were no immediate reports of casualties.
Over 100 firetrucks had converged on Tungmahamek, and several ambulances were standing by on the slum's periphery, but the vehicles appeared unable to navigate the narrow alleyways, a photographer witnessed.
He saw hundreds of residents clogging the narrow streets, their arms full of valuables, or dragging possessions such as refrigerators or gas cylinders out of the fire's reach.
Several volunteers and residents were also seen throwing buckets of water onto flaming rooftops and escorting people to safety.
Metropolitan police spokesman Colonel Phanurat Meepien said the fire had spread to the grounds of a nearby police station and engulfed at least 50 police apartments.
Despite the scope of the blaze there were no immediate reports of deaths or injuries.
"It's too early to know if there are any casualties," he said.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS