Jury Chai
: A gas tank explosion in Myawaddy town at 8 pm last night has left three firefighters with burn injuries.Witnesses report that two houses were also completely destroyed in the fire that resulted from the blast; a school called “School No. 1” and some nearby huts were also damaged.
An eyewitness to the blast informed IMNA that last night’s explosion occurred as a result of the mis-storage or mis-handling of a large quantity of gas tanks, that were last night being transferred from a Myawaddy warehouse to a transport vehicle. Reportedly, one of the tanks began to leak when a worker loaded it into the transport truck; the tank was not removed, and the truck driver drove his cargo until the leak was set alight between the town quarters of 4 and 5 on the outskirts of Myawaddy, causing a fiery explosion
“It was like bomb had exploded very loudly, the first time just one gas [tank] exploded and then all of them burned, nobody was injured [in the blast],” he explained.
According to this source, the transport truck contained roughly 50 gas tanks. The vehicle’s driver reportedly escaped unscathed. The local Myawaddy fire-brigade reportedly arrived soon after the blast to prevent damage to the area; IMNA source claimed that the inferno was larger than expected, and three firefighters were injured.
A source in the Thai city of Mae Sot, located just across the Moei river, told IMNA that Mae Sot residents could see the flames from across the Thai-Burma border. This source at first attributed the sight to a bomb blast, after a bombing in Myawaddy earlier this month left two dead.
“We thought that it was like when the bomb exploded [earlier this month], but later we knew that it was not a bomb, it was a gas explosion” he said.
According to IMNA’s sources in Myawaddy, the warehouse that supplied the leaky gas tank belongs to a man named U Win Hlai, who in 2008 was arrested and sent to jail for a year, after being implicated in an earlier gas explosion in Myawaddy town.
Sources close to U Win Hlai informed IMNA that he and the transport vehicle driver have fled across the Thai-Burma border to Mae Sot, to avoid a second arrest.
