Two rice mills and their storehouses burned to the ground around 1 AM on Thursday morning in Tha Ya Nar Village of Kyaikmayaw Township, Mon State.
The owners of the two mills reported despair at the loss. Several local residents who had also used the facilities to store their own harvests were anxiously searching the debris for any remaining paddies once the fire was extinguished. It, however, remains unclear what started the blaze.
“I kept my 450 Tin of paddy in this storage after we finished harvesting from our farm. Right after the first mill caught fire, we rushed to get here by 1:20 AM. We started putting out the fire as much as we could but it went on and engulfed another mill,” said Nai Chit Win Sein, 54, who was one of the farmers storing paddy at Nai Banyar Htun’s mill. [One Tin is equivalent to 9 gallons.]
Nai Chit Win Sein added that he owes the government 600,000 Kyats to repay a farming loan he was granted, but has now lost all of his harvest to the fire. His family members were carefully gathering any intact paddies they could find.
According to owner Nai Banyar Htun, whose mill lies to the west of the other, his storage facilities contained approximately 17,000 Tin of paddies when the fire began.
“We placed all of our paddies in this mill’s storage. Now, we are collecting the remaining paddies as much as possible. I am not sure what the mill owner has decided regarding whether they will reimburse [the cost of] our paddies,” said Daw Thin Kyaing, a farmer who had 300 Tin of paddy stored in Nai Than Sein’s mill.
The current price of a Tin of paddy of average quality is 6000 Kyat, while better-quality paddy fetches 8000 Kyat, according to local farmers affected by the blaze.
The two razed rice mills neighbor each other but are separately owned. A police officer at the Tha Ya Nar Village told a Mon News Agency (MNA) reporter that the case is currently under investigation by the Kyaikmayaw Township Police Station.
