A 92-year-old man is among 15 people injured in a blaze that tore through the Than Zay market building in Yangon’s Chinatown on Thursday morning.
Firefighters rescued 85 people and a pet dog from the burning 12-storey building in Latha township, fire service officials said.
Doctors at Yangon General Hospital are treating the injured for smoke inhalation.
The fire started in a shop on the building’s second floor at 6:05am and raged for just over three hours before it was put out, said Myo Win, Yangon director of the Fire Service Department.
“We don’t know the cause of the fire yet,” he told Myanmar Now. “We will investigate.”
A total of 118 fire trucks with 900 firefighters worked on rotation to control the fire and find and rescue the occupants, he said. None of the firefighters were injured.
The building has both residential apartments and office units as well as retail areas.
A local municipal office on the fourth floor was also “mildly affected” by the fire but there was no damage, an official there said.
Hundreds of meat sellers in the building’s underground wet market had to stop their business temporarily because of the incident.
The blaze will once again ignite debate about lax fire safety standards in Yangon’s buildings. Two women and a child were killed in a separate fire at an apartment building in Mingalar Taung Nyunt township on Wednesday.
