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No casualties in massive fire at Surabaya retail icon
A building at one of Surabaya's most iconic retail venues caught fire on Wednesday night, but first responders quickly put out the flames. No one was harmed in the incident.
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Smoke and flames engulf building 5 of the Tunjungan Plaza retail complex in Surabaya, East Java, on the evening of April 13. A joint emergency unit managed to contain the fire before it spread to nearby structures. (Antara/Didik Suhartono)
F
ire broke out on Wednesday evening at Tunjungan Plaza, a retail complex located on Jl. Embong Malang in Surabaya, East Java, in one of the worst incidents in the retail icon’s recent history.
The Surabaya 112 Command Center, the city’s emergency response service, said it had deployed a joint response unit involving personnel from the Surabaya Regional Disaster Mitigation Agency (BPBD), the Search and Rescue Agency (Basarnas), the fire department and the local police on receiving reports that fire had broken out at one of the plaza’s six malls.
Some 28 fire trucks were deployed to the scene at 5:30 p.m. local time along with other first responders from the Surabaya BPBD, Basarnas and local police, the center said on its Instagram account.
The fire was extinguished at around 6 p.m. before it had spread to neighboring buildings, although the black smoke from the fire hung over the area and only dissipated a few hours later.
Surabaya Mayor Eri Cahyadi, who rushed to the complex on hearing reports of the fire, said that emergency personnel had not found any injured or fatal victims.
“Thank God there weren’t any [casualties] when I went up there. The response was very fast. The [Tunjungan Plaza] management immediately ordered the evacuation of visitors and the security guards directed them,” Eri said at Tunjungan Plaza 5 late on Wednesday, as quoted by Kompas.com.
“Hopefully, there aren’t any victims inside [the building].”
Authorities were investigating the cause of the fire, which Eri said was initially thought to have started on the fifth floor of plaza 5 and then spread to the lower levels, as the upper levels were largely undamaged.
However, the emergency command center said the fire was more likely to have started from a refrigeration unit on the 10th floor that had short-circuited.
Sutandi Purnomosidi, the marketing director of property management firm PT Pakuwon Jati, echoed this suspicion in a press conference on Thursday, saying that the fire may have been caused by an air conditioning unit on the outside of the building’s cinema on the 10th floor.
Surabaya Police chief Sr. Comr. Yusep Gunawan earlier said that forensics personnel were still investigating the cause of the fire.
PT Pakuwon Jati corporate secretary Minarto Basuki told The Jakarta Post that it had not calculated the estimated damage of the fire.
Spanning 17.5 hectares, Tunjungan Plaza is the country’s second largest retail complex after Pakuwon Mall, also located in Surabaya. The complex’s first mall, Tunjungan Plaza 1, opened in 1986, while Tunjungan Plaza 6, the last addition to the complex, opened in 2017.
According to the Surabaya 112 Command Center, Tunjungan Plaza had been the site of at least three previous fire incidents. A fire broke out in January 2018 at children’s entertainment center Fun World and another at an in-house warehouse in April that same year. Both incidents were traced to an electrical malfunction. Three months later in June 2018, a car parked at Tunjungan Plaza also caught fire.
None of the incidents resulted in fatalities.
