A Number Of Used Train Carriages In Purwakarta Burned, PT KAI Has Not Confirmed The Cause

A number of used train carriages in Purwakarta caught fire. (ANTARA/Ali Khumaini)

PURWAKARTA - A number of used train carriages stored in the Warehousing and Logistics Center of Purwakarta Regency, West Java, owned by PT KAI were burned to the ground. "The fire broke out this afternoon, at the Purwakarta PKLG (Ministry and Logistics Center), to be precise next to Purwakarta Station," said Daop 2 Bandung Public Relations Manager, Mahendro Trang Bawono in Purwakarta, Antara, Thursday, August 31. Information from the field, the fire began to be visible around the PKLG at 11.10 WIB and burned eight used trains. According to him, there were four fire engines from the Purwakarta Regency Government that helped the fire extinguishing process at the PKLG Purwakarta location. So that at 12.15 WIB the fire was successfully extinguished. Daop 2 Bandung appreciated the fire fighting team for successfully extinguishing the fire in a relatively short time, so that the fire did not spread to the station environment. Mahendro said that the fire incident did not interfere with train travel. Because the storage area of the used train is not an operational route. Even so, he apologized for the incident. Now Daop 2 Bandung is still investigating the cause of the fire incident. Meanwhile, a number of local residents said that the fire occurred when there was a work on cutting the train carriages around PKLG Purwakarta. This was confirmed by Yanto, a supervisor of PT Barata Indonesia's work, which is a contractor for the railway carcass slaughter project in the area. "So there are about 16 people, we are cutting from the carcass of the train carriage using a welding. Then a spark appeared which fell to the bottom of the train carriage, not long after, about five minutes, the fire immediately grew," said Yanto.

Shortly after the fire seemed to get bigger, his party immediately asked the Purwakarta Firefighters (Damkar) to extinguish the fire which continued to grow due to the sweeping of the wind.