Last year, Mutalib Uthman was forced to look on helplessly as his house burned to the ground and all his possessions were incinerated in a wall of flames and thick, black smoke.
The book publisher from Selangor said a faulty fuse box on the lower floor sparked the blaze inside his home in Bandar Baru Bangi. His two-storey house in the town near Putrajaya was destroyed quickly despite a neighbour trying to help with a fire extinguisher.
“The box was inside the store room, which was full of unused items,” he told This Week in Asia. “The fire fell onto some of these unused things, and it spread quickly.”
Fortunately, he and his family escaped unscathed.
Such fires are increasingly common across Southeast Asia’s densely packed urban areas, where serious structural defects and poor safety practices are common, according to analysts.
From a building fire in Vietnam’s Hanoi that killed 56 in 2023 and a casino blaze in the town of Poipet in Cambodia that left 26 dead in 2022 to shophouse infernos in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta in 2024 that killed seven, “[towns and] cities have many fire traps contained within them”, said Rosli Azad Khan, a Malaysian planning and urban expert.
