Fire fighters took around half an hour to extinguish the latest fire, in the company’s 24-hour store in Kokkloi in Phang Nga, just across the bridge from Phuket, at 9:30pm on Friday (April 10).
The blaze also destroyed a beauty salon next door. Staff fled after they heard explosions upstairs and saw smoke coming from the store room on the upper floor of the shop. No one was hurt.
Police hypothesised that the fire started after power blacked out the area and the store’s generator kicked in. An electrical short started a fire that leapt to boxes full of whisky bottles, which exploded, adding fuel to the flames.
Investigators are working to ascertain whether this hypothesis is correct. Total losses have not yet been estimated but are likely to be in the millions of baht.
Gov Nisit urged all departments to be prepared for fires after the Kokkloi blaze and in light of the car bomb at Central Festival on Koh Samui, also on Friday night.
“The Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation must prepare enough fire trucks and water trucks because the weather is very hot during these days.”
He ordered all Super Cheap branch storage rooms to be checked, “because the Super Cheap convenience stores seem to have a lot of fires”.
Another Super Cheap store in Wichit was destroyed by fire early on Thursday morning (April 9).
Eighteen months ago the timber-and-tin main branch of Super Cheap burned to the ground in a massive inferno.
Before the two latest blazes, the company has already been accused of not being prepared for fires.
To add to Super Cheap’s woes, one of its delivery trucks flipped at 10pm last night (April 11) in heavy rain on Thepkrasattri Rd.
The driver, Ye Tun Aing, 35, from Myanmar, was not injured. He told police that he was driving the fully-laden to the airport when he lost control in heavy rain, hitting the central divider and flipping the truck over.
One lane of traffic was blocked until a crane could be brought in to right the truck so that it could be towed away.
Just as Super Cheap stores seem to have a habit of bursting into flames, so do the company’s trucks have a habit of falling over. See here and here.